Infrastructure Energy Auditing
Standardised labelling of the energy consumption of products is common in the consumer sector, where labels such as the one shown below help guide consumer choices when purchasing appliances and help incentivise the replacement of older equipment with more environmentally-friendly options.
However, sustainability concerns are only beginning to be considered for large scientific infrastructure such as electron microscopes, and no labelling system currently exists to fairly compare energy usage across different devices or families of devices. Moreover, there is limited sustainability data available with which to construct such a labelling system, as characterising the energy usage of such infrastructure is challenging due to their multi-faceted needs.
We are developing an open access tool to calculate and share the complex energy usage of large scientific infrastructure, and hope to develop a labelling system using the data collected from this tool. The tool is a macro-enabled Excel spreadsheet and can be accessed using the first button below. You may need to enable macros for the spreadsheet to work.
Once complete, the spreadsheet can be uploaded to the submission form using the second button below. We welcome any data submission or feedback.