Remote Work to Wipe Out $800B from Office Values, McKinsey Says
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
What are the C02 savings and losses to ExxonMobil et al?
It's not just about the landlords and commercial renters locked into long term contracts.
You can have one office for the 100 workers and they all share the same AC.
If they all work from home, there might be 100 houses that have the AC on. The office AC energy usage might be the equivalent of 2 houses. So you're increasing energy usage by 50x.
The difference in energy use would be substantial - especially with McMansions.
I'm pretty sure there are savings, but not 50x. In terms of output my company office has about 4 ACs of my scale for my office with a capacity for 12 people.
And since the office has huge windows trapping a lot more heat, I don't think they're very much more efficient.
I'd gather the overall inefficiency is there, but it's way lower than 50x, more like 3x. And commuting to work by car burns a lot more fuel than that.
Also, a cooling an entire McMansion, where a lot of Americans live, would be similar to cooling an office for 50 people.
>In terms of output my company office has about 4 ACs of my scale for my office with a capacity for 12 people
It doesn't matter how many AC units there are. What matters most is the volume of space. No matter how many AC units there are, once the desired temperature is reached, they will turn themselves on/off to stay at that temperature.
But the ACs in my office are constantly working, due to the large windows trapping all the heat. As soon as you turn them off it heats up very quickly.
It's probably the building that's at fault here. I do admit it could be more efficient without the office windows.
I've even seen people open the windows or doors to let in hot air while the office AC is running.
Shortcuts can be done in small offices but the larger the office the more likely there is an overall climate control plan where the envelope has actually been checked for adequate insulation.
Second, no amount of insulation is going to make air conditioning cheap or efficient in Texas or Florida.
If you assume a commute by EV then you can directly compare the kwh used to get to work vs run the a/c at home. As it happens, the way I actually commute is bike and public transit, so the calculation is more difficult. But I do know that my electricity bill is dominated by EV charging and a/c in the summer.
I'd gather most is due to saving the commute by car to work, which is already failing in many US cities, but holds pretty well in the rest of the world.
If you move to the countryside and don't commute to work, is that really worse for the environment?
Especially since cities are overbooked in terms of space anyway. Every family that moves to the countryside frees up apartments for those that have to commute to work and can then live in the city instead.
I think remote changes a lot of these calculations.
I'm not even sure they are. 50% of the world's population live in cities but cities produce 70% of our CO2 emissions.
It is absolutely not the case here in developed countries. A city dweller who bikes to work is not equivalent to a suburbanite driving around their SUV just to pick up bananas from the grocery store.
FWiW I have mostly always lived and worked in rural | remote areas and where I currently live most people walk to the local shop and are almost all eating the bulk of their food from sources in the surrounding area.
It's small town that was once a first inland european settlement point in Australia - lot of large scale farmers with big town lots that have old fruiting trees, food plots, chickens, etc.
Lots of meticulously restored, maintained, and used cars from the 1920s - 1960s, and a surprising amount of bleeding edge tech.
A city dweller tends to be richer which affords more consumption.
>ExxonMobil earned nearly $56 billion in profit in 2022, setting an annual record not just for itself but for any U.S. or European oil giant.Jan 31, 2023
https://www.npr.org/2023/01/31/1152776315/exxon-mobil-earnin...
I’ve done manual labor jobs in the past, so not hyperbole.
I’d probably figure something out in the middle if faced with it, but I’m willing to throw down the gauntlet for my own life.
I mean anecdotally, the NYC office is complaining they've switched to hot desking. I've never heard of anybody switching to hot desking because it was too empty... This is of course after previously the space-per-person has decreased.
So… you’re using less office space like the article says, yeah?
And no, the “McKinsey is always wrong” meme is completely divorced from reality. They’re wrong a lot, sure, but they do put out a lot of very high quality work. It’s just HNers like to put software engineers on a pedestal above everyone else.
No.
If you have 100 people in 1000 sqft then that's 10ft/person. If you have 1000 people in 1000 sqft then that's 1ft/person.
Still using 1000 sqft and you don't go from 8ft desks to 6ft desks because you're gathering too much empty space.
I wonder how many lives are saved by remote work in a country like the USA, where cars are the primary means of transport?
https://www.axios.com/2023/04/12/commercial-real-estate-regi...