• Heating, lighting, carpooling… The government presented this Thursday the thirty measures of its sobriety plan.

    In the lot, is the teleworking that the executive wishes to encourage, the public service having to set the example.

  • The key to guaranteed fuel savings, says the government.

    But on gas and electricity, the effect could be the opposite if offices remain heated while teleworkers do the same at their homes.

  • Hence the interest in organizing telework, recognizes the government.

    Should we then move towards generalized telework, on Fridays for example?

    Why not believes the négaWatt association.

This is one of the fifteen key measures of the sobriety plan presented by the government on Thursday with a view to reducing our energy consumption by 10% within two years (compared to 2019).

Between shifting the start and end of the heating period by fifteen days, remembering that 19°C is the maximum heating temperature in offices or reducing lighting times before and after professional sports competitions, the executive also wants encourage telecommuting.

At least in the public service, where it is a question of being exemplary.

The plan thus provides that agents will benefit from an increase in the flat-rate telework allowance of 15% in order to cover the increase in energy prices from the beginning of 2023. Companies are invited to “provide for a teleworking organization for emergency situations, in the event of particular tension on the network”.



Certain fuel savings

This therefore assumes that teleworking actually allows energy savings.

“We are certain that when we telework, we save fuel”, assured Agnès Pannier-Runacher, at the microphone of RTL this Thursday morning.

And if we should not miss it this winter, the Minister for Energy Transition recalls that this sobriety plan is part of such a climatic logic.

In a study of October 2020, the French Environment and Energy Management Agency (Ademe) noted this overall positive effect of telework on CO2 emissions linked to transport, simply by avoiding home connections. -work.

It thus estimated, on average, at 271 kg equivalent CO2 (eqCO2), per year and per day of telework, while underlining negative collateral effects.

For example, traveling by car for shopping or going to sports after work.

Not gained in advance on gas and electricity…

So much for the fuels.

But it is much more electricity and gas that could be subject to strong tensions this winter.

However, on these two energies, the effect of telework is much more random, even to the point that Stéphane Chatelin, director of négaWatt, an association specializing in energy, says he is a little surprised by the presence of this lever in the key measures. of this sobriety plan.

“We are in favor of the implementation of telework, but we do not see very well, in the short term, for this winter, the gains that we can expect from it”, he specifies.

The risk is even to have an opposite effect on the heating.

"This will be the case if people who had taken the reflex to lower it or even turn it off at home, when they were not there, turn it back on on teleworking days and, at the same time,

However, this is the classic scenario even today, we fear at négaWatt.

“We are not very good in France on the management of electrical equipment in operation, observe its director.

We see it through the measurement campaigns that we carry out: a traditional tertiary building consumes more, over the year, in periods of vacancy than in periods of occupation.

This is partly because a number of pieces of equipment* are left running 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.”

The imperative to organize telework

Still at the microphone of RTL, Agnès Pannier-Runacher recognized that heating savings were not automatic with teleworking.

And in its sobriety plan, the government also insists, particularly in the public service, on the need to organize it “in order to optimize the use of buildings”.

“We saw with the health crisis how quickly telework could be implemented in a large number of administrations and companies, without preparation, recalls Stéphane Chatelin.

With the hindsight we have today, we could very well imagine the establishment of a telework day on Friday, for example.

This would allow the heating to be turned off on Thursday evening and turned on again only on Monday morning.

It wouldn't be nothing.

»

This sobriety plan will not go so far as to impose it.

This is not the spirit: “We are in a logic of sobriety chosen to avoid more restrictive measures”, we fit immediately to Matignon.

In other words: no regulations, no coercive measures, just incentives to be more sober.

This also applies to teleworking in the public service.

"The administrations will organize it themselves, service by service, according to their particularities", they say in the entourage of Stanislas Guérini, Minister of Transformation and the Public Service.

An experiment is already planned, on All Saints' Day, with the closure, for four days from October 29 to November 1 inclusive, of four sites of the Ministries of Ecological Transition and Energy Transition.

Nothing else so far.

A first step this Thursday

Enough to leave Stéphane Chatelin unsatisfied.

"This is the limit of the plan as a whole: volunteering alone will not be enough to put us on the path to sobriety**", considers the director of négaWatt without however brushing aside this plan of sobriety.

"It is interesting in particular by the measures that the State takes to show itself as an example," he points out.

It is an important first step to embark the whole society towards more sobriety”.

This is also the hope of Gilles Aymoz, deputy director of sustainable cities and territories at Ademe: "What is very interesting today is the mobilization around this subject of sobriety", he underlines.

The rest, that is to say the implementation of these sobriety measures, could go very quickly.

Including on this issue of having organized teleworking to allow offices to be closed.

“The current surge in energy prices, which weighs on the accounts of companies and administrations, are causing building managers to look into this question on their own, adds Gilles Aymoz.

The challenge, to listen to him, will be more to perpetuate these “sobriety” reflexes after the crisis.

"Because what is launched today is also extremely relevant from the perspective of ecological transition", he recalls, like Agnès Pannier-Runacher, earlier today.

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* This is the case with ventilation, illustrates the director of négaWatt.

“In the vast majority of cases, it operates continuously, even when the buildings are empty, without that having any interest, he regrets.

Turning it off would be far from trivial, insists négaWatt.

“By doing it in tertiary buildings during periods of vacancy, we would save 18 Twh, or the equivalent of the production of three nuclear reactors, he specifies.

This is the second source of energy saving after heating.

However, the sobriety plan does not mention it.

»

** On this point, Stéphane Chatelin also cites another emblematic measure of the sobriety plan: that of wanting to limit the speed on the motorway to 110 km/h instead of 130 km/h for agents using their service vehicle during business trips.

"This passage to 110 km / h that we have been advocating for a long time, will only be real if there is a change in the regulations", he believes.

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