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It definitely feels like that when you look up at the skyline of the City of London well after office hours. All these towering skyscrapers are lit up with absolutely no one in. And while the legend of the occasional graduate banker burning the midnight oil and napping in sleep pods may well be the case at the top firms, the old-school idea of thousands of employees heading to their HQs every single night is simply more fiction than fact.

When you really get down to the data, it’s clear that the UK’s major corporations are powering up a ghost town for the majority of the year. Research from The Green Alliance revealed in 2021 that thousands of offices in the five biggest cities in the UK (Bristol, Manchester, Leeds, Birmingham and of course, London) waste enough energy to power more than 100,000 homes.

The problem is only more pervasive as the years go on. The energy wasted by companies across the UK could power up London for seven whole years. This feels not only financially wasteful – the estimated cost of this is around £60 million a year – but also unacceptable given the impact of rising energy fees on everyday families struggling to keep up with the cost of living crisis. We all know that the built environment contributes a staggering amount to the global climate crisis (buildings accounting for 37% of the world’s global carbon emissions) but it also takes up 34% of the global energy demand. Imagine if that energy demand was being met in the right places, instead of wasted on unused, empty offices?

And although we’re piling the heat onto Fortune 500 firms, it’s not just big businesses, but small and medium sized ones (SMEs) that can also make a substantial impact on the environment and the people within it. The Energy Trust estimates that SMEs could reduce their energy bills by 18-25% just by introducing the right initiatives and behavioural changes. This behavioural change factor is what motivated us at Metrikus to launch our first ever Dark January campaign last year, to combat the whopping 30% of the energy wasted annually in commercial spaces.

While it feels like this is an insurmountable, crazy hard problem, we just know that people on every level want to do better, but don’t know where to start. In our experience at Metrikus, we’ve seen that while switching off those office lights might not be the silver bullet that can solve everything (in fact, in many ways it’s just the tip of the iceberg), it’s a really good starting point that can pave the way for a lot of other meaningful energy reductions. You don’t have to be a massive corporation with a high-tech integrated building management system (BMS) to see the impact right away. So we set out with one simple message to all businesses: #TurnYourBloodyLightsOff.

We were overwhelmed with the response. Reps from major organisations took the pledge, and Hammersmith BID was the first BID in London to do so. Only a few weeks later, the City of London committed to turning off and dimming their office lights at night (we have a sneaky suspicion that our incessant emails to Mayor Sadiq Khan might have been the gentle nudge needed!).

So, here we are again, going even bigger for Dark January in 2024. We’re sharing resources on the simple measures companies can adopt to take action. We want individuals on every level to share how they’re reducing energy waste on LinkedIn, using the hashtag #LightsOut and nominating others to do the same. If you’re the one running the energy and HVAC systems at your work, seize this opportunity to do even more. But you also don’t need to hold the CEO or Head of Facilities title to make a difference: just turn off lights in unused areas; find out the person responsible for your floor’s energy use, or drop an email to your senior managers to explore improvements to your company’s internal energy charters.

We really believe that small actions compound to make meaningful change – so let’s share examples and get nominating! And maybe, just maybe, we can get the Fortune 500 to be a little less afraid of the dark.

#LightsOut #DarkJanuary