Your Office Is Wasting Up to 30% of Its Energy Budget. Here’s Where It Goes
- David Owo
- Mar 9
- 7 min read
Most businesses know they spend too much. Few know exactly where.
Heating runs while no one is in the building. Devices sit on standby all night. The printer warms up again and again for a handful of pages.
Individually, none of these feels like a big problem. That is exactly why they rarely get fixed.
Analyses of commercial buildings show that operational issues, such as poor scheduling and controls, can easily waste 20–30% of total energy use. In office portfolios, this kind of waste is common, where systems are not matched to real occupancy.
If your company pays around €800 a month for energy, a 20–30% waste range means €160–€240 leaving your account every month with no benefit.
Here is where it goes – and what you can do about it.
1. Heating and Cooling on Nobody’s Schedule
In most commercial buildings, heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) are the single largest energy users, often accounting for around 40% of energy consumption. They are also the easiest systems to leave running by accident.
The problem is rarely the technology; it is the schedule.
Many offices heat or cool from early morning until late evening, even if the building is only busy for 8–9 hours.
Studies of commercial buildings show that mis‑set schedules and temperature setpoints can account for 10–30% of avoidable HVAC energy use.
Guidance on “thermostat setbacks” indicates that lowering or raising the thermostat outside occupied hours can reduce heating and cooling costs by around 10%, and in some cases significantly more.
For Dutch offices, there is another layer: since 2023, office buildings larger than 100 m² must have at least an energy label C, which corresponds to a primary fossil energy use of no more than 225 kWh per m² per year. Offices that do not meet this requirement may no longer be used as offices until they are improved.
If your actual usage per square metre is far above that level, you are overpaying and drifting out of compliance at the same time.
What to do: A smart thermostat costs between €200 and €350. It pays itself back within two months in most office setups. Align heating and cooling schedules with actual occupancy rather than broad “7:00 to 19:00 just in case” time blocks, adjust setpoints outside working hours, and keep up with basic maintenance, such as filter changes. These steps cut costs and help move your building towards label C or better.
2. Lights Burning in Empty Rooms
Lighting is another major, and often visible, source of waste.
Depending on the building and hours of use, lighting typically accounts for roughly 15–25% of electricity use in commercial offices. A significant share of that happens in rooms where nobody is sitting: toilets, meeting rooms between bookings, storage areas and corridors.
The underlying pattern is simple: lights are manually switched and rely on someone remembering to turn them off. People rarely do.
Two changes usually pay back quickly:
Occupancy sensors: motion or presence‑based sensors turn lights off in empty rooms without relying on behaviour. In offices, they can significantly reduce lighting energy use in intermittently used spaces.
LED upgrades: replacing older fluorescent or halogen lighting with LEDs can reduce lighting energy consumption by up to 50–80%, and LEDs last much longer. In many offices, LED retrofits have a payback period well under two years, especially in long‑use areas.
What to do: Occupancy sensors fix this completely. They cost between €20 and €60 per room. They do not require anyone to think about it. Prioritise rooms with long lighting hours and irregular use by installing occupancy sensors in bathrooms, storage rooms, toilets, meeting rooms and open‑plan areas. Combine LEDs and sensors so the lights are both more efficient and can be switched off when not needed.
3. Devices That Never Sleep
Every device plugged into your office account consumes about 10-15% of the power. Be it laptops, desktops, screens, printers, coffee machines, chargers, or draws, even when nobody is there.
“Plug and process loads” are now one of the largest sources of electricity use in many commercial buildings. A desktop computer in sleep mode still draws 1 to 6 watts. A printer on standby draws 3 to 5 watts. Multiply that across 10 workstations, two printers, a coffee machine, and a fridge.
Over a year, phantom loads in a small office typically account for €150 to €400 in electricity costs. That is money spent on nothing. Research on plug-load management shows that actively managing these devices can reduce whole‑building energy use by around 10%.
Common issues include:
Computers and monitors are left on overnight and over weekends.
Printers and multifunction devices are permanently in “ready” mode.
Kitchen appliances and chargers are left powered even when the office is closed.
Individually, each device draws a few watts, but across tens of devices running thousands of hours per year, unmanaged plug loads in a small office can easily add hundreds of euros per year to the electricity bill without providing any value.
What to do: Introduce automatic sleep and shutdown policies on IT equipment, use smart power strips for shared areas, and phase out the worst‑performing legacy devices. Set computers to hibernate after 15 minutes of inactivity. This is classic Green IT: lower energy costs, lower emissions and better data for your energy and ESG reporting.
4. Printing Habits Stuck in the Past
Printing is another often‑ignored cost.
A widely used benchmark is that an average office employee prints around 10,000 pages per year, with an estimated annual cost of around $700 once paper, toner, maintenance, and hardware are included. These figures translate roughly to the same order of magnitude in euros for European offices. At the same time, studies indicate that around 17% of printed pages are never used, and roughly 65% of office documents are discarded or recycled on the day they are printed.
This means a large part of your printing budget generates no lasting value.
You also pay twice: once for the paper and toner, and again for the waste collection and processing of all that material.
What to do: Introduce secure or “follow‑me” printing so jobs only print when someone is physically at the device, move routine processes (approvals, signatures, internal memos) into digital workflows, and monitor printing volumes by team. That reduces direct costs and waste and makes document storage and retrieval easier when you need evidence for audits or ESG questionnaires.
Most businesses discover they are ordering in small quantities at high prices, buying brands they do not need, and stockpiling things that expire.
5. Your Waste Collection Costs More Than It Should
Waste costs money twice: you pay to buy things, and then you pay to throw them away.
In the Netherlands, businesses usually pay a fixed fee for waste collection plus a variable fee based on how many containers they put out or how often they are collected. If most of what you throw away goes into one mixed rubbish container, you are likely paying more than necessary.
Different types of waste – paper and cardboard, plastics, organic waste, and residual waste may be subject to different tariffs. When everything goes into a single mixed bin, you pay the highest rate for material that could have been cheaper to dispose of or even recycle.
In many small businesses:
Office, kitchen and shop waste all end up in the same container.
No one checks what is actually in the bins.
The collection contract rolls over every year without review.
That is fast, but it is also expensive.
Reducing waste at the source is the most direct fix: less unnecessary packaging means less rubbish out. On top of that, simple changes like switching to reusable cups and plates in the kitchen can cut the number of bin bags you use by 30 to 40% in a year and reduce your variable collection costs. Cafés and salons see the biggest gains here because consumables are high-volume.
What to do: Look in your bins for one week. Identify your two biggest types of waste (for example, cardboard and plastic). Start separating those, and ask your waste collector what the price difference is between mixed residual waste and sorted streams. In many Dutch municipalities, this alone reduces the cost of business waste.
The Honest Version: Why This Does Not Fix Itself
None of these actions is complicated. That is exactly why they get postponed.
They stay on the “we will get to it” list:
Thermostat schedules that have not changed in years.
Printers and devices that hum quietly through the night.
Supply orders are repeated every month without a single review.
Waste contracts are renewed automatically without checking if they still fit.
For Dutch small and medium-sized enterprises, tight margins and low risk tolerance mean that this kind of persistent, low‑level waste can quietly erode profitability. It also limits your ability to answer questions from clients, banks and landlords about your energy performance and environmental impact.
Where Greennect Fits In
Greennect works with Dutch small and medium-sized enterprises that:
Face real pressure on costs and sustainability from clients, banks and landlords.
Do not have an in‑house sustainability team.
Need practical, time‑boxed support to turn scattered actions into a simple, repeatable system.
We help you:
Identify the biggest cost leaks in your office: energy, lighting, devices, printing, space and waste.
Put numbers on them using your own bills and usage data, not generic averages.
Prioritise fixes that pay back quickly and also generate evidence you can reuse in ESG questionnaires and basic reporting.
Instead of another generic checklist, you leave with:
Specific changes in your office environment.
A clearer view of what you are spending and why.
Better data to back up your sustainability story with clients and partners.
If you want to see how much money your office is quietly wasting and where to start fixing it, you can get in touch via greennect.com for a short, focused review tailored to your situation.
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