Energy consumption in labs: how to make a real, green difference by taking just a few simple actions

It's not easy to see, but labs are consuming massive amounts of energy.

Laboratories typically use ten times more energy than office buildings, and per square metre, only data centres use more. My Green Lab's 2025 Carbon Impact of Biotech & Pharma Report confirms the picture hasn't improved: labs still run up to four times more water use than a typical office on top of that energy load. With roughly 40% of global CO₂ emissions coming from electricity generation, reducing lab energy consumption is one of the more direct levers available. The reassuring part is that most of the fix is habit, not capital spend.

The autoclave is a blessing and a curse

Autoclaves are indispensable for sterilising utensils, reagents and waste, and they leave a genuinely large environmental footprint doing it. A large steam-jacketed autoclave heats water into steam, then cools that steam back down enough to discharge it safely through metal pipework, and a single sterilisation cycle can pull several hundred litres of water alongside a serious amount of energy. Bench-top autoclaves are gentler on both counts, but the principle holds either way: only autoclave what genuinely needs to be sterile, and don't run a partial load. An autoclave uses roughly the same water and energy whether it's full or half empty, so if your lab can't fill one on its own within a reasonable time, it's worth asking whether a neighbouring lab wants to share a cycle. A water-saving retrofit device suited to your specific model is also worth investigating, and it's worth advocating for a more efficient model whenever your lab or institute is due to replace one.

Shutting the sash matters more than people think

Air circulation, fume hoods, laminar air flow benches, biosafety cabinets, point exhausts, general air conditioning, is one of the biggest single contributors to a lab's energy bill. A fume hood running flat out can use as much energy in a year as three and a half households, and biosafety cabinets and LAF benches aren't much prettier depending on their age and model. These systems exist to keep you and your samples safe, so they can't simply be switched off, but they can be turned down or shut when they're not actively needed. Closing the sash when you step away cuts energy use roughly in half, and keeping it low while you're working under it is also just safer for you. Storing bottles, racks or clutter inside a fume hood, LAF bench or biosafety cabinet blocks airflow and makes the unit work harder to compensate, so keeping them clear helps too.

The small appliances add up faster than you'd expect

Water baths, heat blocks, centrifuges, shakers and rotators rarely get blamed for a lab's energy use, but they should. A heat block at 90°C can draw as much energy as one and a half of your –20°C freezers. A ten to twelve litre water bath at 37°C is roughly equivalent to two small fridges running continuously. Read that again, because it's easy to underestimate. Some labs have reportedly cut energy consumption by half simply by building the habit of switching off equipment that isn't in active use, and the benefit compounds: idle equipment heats the room it's in, which then makes air conditioning and cold storage work harder to compensate. Turning off a centrifuge or a shaker, in other words, quietly helps your freezers too.

Turning things off is simple in theory and hard in practice

Lab users are busy, and remembering to switch off equipment after use competes with everything else on a given day. More often than forgetfulness, though, the real obstacle is that a lab full of people rarely agrees on when equipment should go off. A useful fix is to walk through the equipment as a group at a lab meeting and settle a rule for each item: turn off directly after use, ask before switching off, never turn off, or turn off if you're last to leave. Put a sticker with the rule on each appliance so nobody has to remember or negotiate it in the moment. It also helps to measure how long each piece of equipment actually takes to warm up or cool down, since not knowing tends to make people switch things on hours earlier than necessary just in case; once you know the real figure, write it on a label too. Outlet timers are a cheap, low-effort way to guarantee anything non-critical powers down overnight.

It pays for itself twice

Reducing energy use isn't only a carbon-footprint exercise. It lowers the electricity bill and extends the working life of equipment, and anyone who has had to stall or postpone an experiment while waiting for a repairer, and then wait again for spare parts, knows how costly a breakdown really is in time as well as money. If sustainability alone isn't the argument that lands with your lab or your boss, the cost and reliability case usually does.