Energy Optimisation

Put down the controller and pick up a book: the small act that could help Britain's grid

We have found a villain for our electricity anxieties, and it is the AI data centre. But the same digital energy system runs into every child's bedroom in Britain, and the answer may start at the kitchen table, between five and six.

Craig Lewis

— 11 min read
Share
A child reading a book at a wooden table in lamplight
Photo by Michał Parzuchowski on Unsplash

At about a quarter past five most weekdays, my son sits down in front of the television, picks up a controller and, for the next hour or so, our house draws an extra 270 watts from the grid.

I know this because I am a technologist who works in domestic energy, and we monitor our home rather more closely than most sane families would. A PlayStation 5 and a decent-sized television, running together, cost us roughly 7p an hour at the current capped rate. Four hours a day comes to about £103 a year. Eight hours, £206.

That is not, I should say at once, an argument for confiscating the controller. Gaming is entertainment and competition and, for a great many young people, the place where their friendships actually happen. Nor is one console in Dorset going to trouble the National Energy System Operator.

But it is a useful place to start, because we have spent the past two years arguing about electricity while looking in the wrong direction.

The villain of the piece

Artificial intelligence is eating the grid. That, at least, is the story that has taken hold. Data centres are multiplying, their grid connections are measured in hundreds of megawatts, and the technology companies behind them are scouring the country for enough generation to feed the next wave of computing. The concern is real. But our hunt for a villain is turning the energy transition into a pantomime, and the audience has started booing on cue.

Technology is not a single building on an industrial estate outside Slough. It is one interconnected system, stretching from enormous computing halls at one end to the games console in a child’s bedroom at the other. The data centre catches our eye because its demand is concentrated and visible: one connection, one very large number. The same demand spread quietly across a million living rooms is almost invisible.

Consider the numbers. Sony have shipped more than 95 million PS5 consoles worldwide. Industry estimates put around 5.5 million of them in Britain, alongside some 3.3 million of Microsoft’s current Xbox Series machines. If every British PS5 drew 200 watts at the same moment, the consoles alone would pull 1.1 gigawatts, before a single television was switched on. They never will, of course; it is not a forecast. But it shows the scale hiding inside an ordinary household appliance.

Around 5.5 million PS5 consoles are thought to be in British homes. Photo by User_Pascal on Unsplash

And consoles are not the top of the range. A serious gaming PC and monitor can draw 700 to 900 watts under load. Nvidia’s flagship RTX 5090 graphics card is rated at 575 watts on its own, before you add the processor, the cooling, the storage and the screen. At 800 watts, four hours a day works out at about £305 a year.

We have become fascinated by the electricity consumed by graphics processors in AI data centres while barely noticing that increasingly powerful graphics processors are arriving in private homes. One is concentrated, metered and visible to the system operator. The other is scattered across millions of households and simply disappears into the national demand curve.

The point is not that gaming is bad, or that domestic technology is secretly a bigger problem than AI. It is that both sit on the same physical system. Every apparently weightless digital experience rests on power stations, cables, cooling and carbon. You cannot understand one end of it while pretending the other does not exist.

When seven pence is not small change

For a comfortable household paying by direct debit, 7p an hour vanishes without trace. For someone watching the credit on a prepayment meter tick down, electricity feels very different.

Prepayment is not the same thing as poverty, but it is concentrated among people with the least room for error. Research has found that around a third of low-income households pay by prepayment or on receipt of a bill, compared to roughly a fifth of households overall. Among National Energy Action’s clients in energy debt this year, 42.7 per cent were on prepayment meters, 87.5 per cent were on means-tested benefits and 30.8 per cent were already cutting back on food.

At 270 watts, £1 buys about 14 hours of PlayStation and television. But only if the fridge, the lights, the kettle, the cooker and everything else in the house use nothing at all. In one home, an evening’s gaming is a line so small it never appears on the monthly statement. In another, it is moving the meter towards the moment when the lights, the broadband and the fridge all go off together.

In one home, an evening’s gaming never appears on the statement. In another, it is moving the meter towards the moment the lights go off.

This complicates the familiar conversation about digital exclusion. We ask whether a child has a laptop and a connection. We ask far less often whether the household can afford the electricity to charge the laptop, to light and heat a room to work in, and to keep the router on.

Nearly 2.2 million pupils in England, 25.7 per cent, were eligible for free school meals in January 2025, before the government widened eligibility further. Free-school-meal status does not prove a family is fuel-poor or on prepayment. It does mark out a population more exposed to the overlapping squeeze of energy, food and digital costs.

As a school governor, I see the familiar measures of disadvantage: attainment, attendance, safeguarding, Pupil Premium. Schools work extraordinarily hard to understand the barriers in front of their children. Household energy is almost entirely absent from that picture. When a Chromebook keeps turning up uncharged, or the online homework is never quite finished, it may be disengagement. It may also be worth asking, quietly, whether energy insecurity is somewhere in the background.

The latest official model puts 9.1 per cent of households in Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole in fuel poverty, and 9.8 per cent across the wider Dorset Council area. Those figures sit close to the English average of 9.9 per cent, but averages hide sharp local concentrations, and the South West has the deepest fuel-poverty gap in England: the households affected would need their annual energy costs cut by £511, on average, to escape it.

This is one reason better data matters. Official statistics tell us where fuel poverty is probable. Carefully governed, anonymised smart-meter data could show where consumption is being severely suppressed, where a cold snap produces oddly little extra demand, and where the pattern looks like a family rationing itself. Data cannot diagnose poverty or explain anyone’s choices on its own. Used responsibly, alongside people who know the area, it can help reach households before the crisis rather than describing them afterwards.

National Energy Action’s strategy calls this “tackling the worst first”, with support guaranteed and policy turned into delivery. Energy Saving Trust talks of empowering householders to make better energy choices through impartial advice and practical tools. Both are right. But empowerment should not begin with somebody’s first impossible bill. It should begin at school.

We teach circuits, but not energy

England’s primary curriculum does teach children about electricity. In Year 4 they name the appliances that run on it and build simple circuits with cells, wires, bulbs and switches. In Year 6 they learn how voltage affects the components and how to draw the symbols.

What it never asks them to understand is the electricity running through their own lives. Watts, kilowatt-hours, what an appliance costs to run, what a bill is, why the grid has a peak and why the carbon in a unit of electricity changes through the day: none of that formally arrives until Key Stage 3.

So a child can leave primary school able to draw a circuit but unable to say what it costs to run a games console. We teach how electricity travels round a loop, but not how it travels through a household budget.

This need not become another frightening lecture about a planet resting on children’s shoulders. They do not need guilt, they need practical literacy: why a kettle draws a huge amount of power for a short time; why heating generally matters more than phone charging; why 270 watts all evening adds up; and why the same unit of electricity can carry a different carbon cost at six in the evening than at two in the morning.

Children are the future custodians of the energy system. They will be its consumers, its engineers, its voters, its bill-payers and eventually the people who run it. Understanding energy ought to be as ordinary as understanding money.

As a Scout trustee, I see how well children learn responsibility by doing rather than by being told. Measure an appliance. Read a meter. Write down the results. Work out the cost. Look at the grid’s generation mix and decide what could move to another time. That is science, maths, data and citizenship wrapped inside an activity with an answer a child can see for themselves.

As a supporter of grassroots rugby, I see another part of the answer. At our local club, £3 buys a child three hours of running about, coaching and companionship, and a hot dog. Scouting offers similarly absurd value: practical skills, independence, adventure and belonging, most of it delivered by volunteers.

Even £3, plus the transport and the kit, can be a barrier when every pound is already spoken for. That is why schools’ disadvantage strategies, Pupil Premium, holiday programmes and partnerships with community groups matter. Putting down a controller is only a fair invitation if there is something worthwhile, and reachable, to pick up instead.

The Reading Hour

My daughter’s school asks us to hear her read regularly. Like most families, we try to fit it into the early evening. That ordinary request suggests a small national experiment.

Between five and six, Britain’s electricity system is usually climbing towards its evening peak. It is not the dirtiest hour every day: wind, sunshine, demand and what happens to be generating all change the carbon carried by the grid, and that variability is itself part of the lesson. But early evening is reliably among the most constrained periods of the day.

One family makes no difference to the grid. A million families would remove 270 megawatts from the evening peak. Photo by Vitaly Gariev on Unsplash

So what if schools encouraged families to make it a Reading Hour? Put down the controller, switch off the biggest screen in the house, and pick up a book.

In our house that removes roughly 270 watts of demand. One family makes no discernible difference to anything. A million families would take 270 megawatts off the evening peak. If the gaming hour was genuinely avoided on every one of the 190 school days, those households would save 51.3 gigawatt-hours of electricity a year.

At an illustrative early-evening carbon intensity of 150 to 300 grams per kilowatt-hour, that avoids somewhere between 7,700 and 15,400 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent. If the gaming simply shifts to later in the evening, the saving is only the difference between the two periods, though moving demand off the peak still helps the system.

Reading is not literally free of energy. The room is still heated and a lamp is on. But where a family is already together in a lit, warm room, the extra demand of opening a book is negligible next to a console and a 55-inch television.

More important than the carbon arithmetic is what the experiment would teach. Children could measure a console at school, turn watts into pence, look at the live grid data and add up their class’s collective result. It would support reading without inventing another piece of homework. It would make an invisible national system tangible without blaming anybody for using it.

For some children the alternative hour would be Scouts, or rugby, or a homework club, a library, cooking, or simply being outside. The aim is not an approved list of improving activities. It is to widen choices that have narrowed, and to show that millions of modest decisions become material when they happen at the same time.

Technology in the witness box

As a technologist, I do not think technology is innocent. But nor is it the villain in a convenient pantomime.

Every apparently weightless digital experience rests on power stations, cables and carbon. Photo by Matthew Henry on Unsplash

The same smart meters that expose demand can help families understand it. Device signatures can turn a mysterious total into recognisable activities. Forecasting can anticipate need. Batteries, electric cars, heat pumps and hot-water cylinders can respond to the hours when electricity is cleanest. Artificial intelligence can turn complicated household data into advice a person can actually use. Properly governed data can help councils and charities target support without putting individual families under surveillance.

Eventually, every household could have a private, understandable energy and carbon budget: not permission from the state to live an ordinary life, and not a mechanism for the wealthy to buy the right to pollute, but information that makes personal responsibility possible. It would show what was essential, what was flexible, and which one or two changes would matter without making life smaller.

Responsibility cannot rest with individuals alone. Government must build a cleaner, fairer system and protect those who cannot safely cut back. Technology companies must improve efficiency and tell people, in plain language, what their products cost to run. Schools must prepare children for the world they will inherit. Community organisations need the means to keep taking part affordable.

But institutions cannot make every decision inside every home. Those decisions remain personal, and personal responsibility requires knowledge and real choice.

I am not going to tell my son to stop playing PlayStation. It is part of his social world and he loves it. I do want him to understand what happens when he presses the button: the 270 watts, the cost, the power stations and cables behind it, and the alternatives open to him.

Nor do I want to frighten my daughter about the climate. I would rather hand her a book, show her the meter, and let her discover that one small act, repeated by a great many people, can have consequences.

We should keep asking hard questions about the electricity AI demands. But the answer is not to find a technological villain and boo from the stalls. It is to understand the whole system, educate the people who will inherit it, and use our ingenuity to make it better.

Between five and six this evening, that might begin with something wonderfully ordinary: put down the controller and pick up a book.

Craig Lewis is a technologist working in domestic energy, a co-founder of LDS Consultancy, a school governor and a Scout trustee.

Sources and notes

Read more