Hello and welcome to BBC R&D Explains where we lift the lid on
some of our biggest projects and talk directly to the people behind them.
In this episode, I'll be chatting to some of our
sustainable engineering team who are investigating how we
can reduce the environmental impact of our services
Jigna Chandaria is a lead R&D engineer at BBC R&D and she's
heading up our work on sustainable engineering, hi Jigna.
Tell us what exactly does sustainable engineering mean?
So we are looking at the environmental impact
of our media technology. We are looking at how we can quantify
that environmental impact and then also what we can do to reduce that.
And when did the work start
and what has been the background? How did it all come into play.
So the work started more than a decade ago.
We were at an innovation event and one of my colleagues kinda
posed the question to the floor, which is better watching
TV over broadcast or watching it over iPlayer?
And I was thinking, Wow, that's an amazing question,
what is the answer to that? And I decided I would like to research and
work out the answer. Because you know it's a huge question,
a lot of work must go into you know, trying to answer that question.
So what's your team approach been so far?
so the key, the key things that we try and do is,
um, this kind of measuring and modelling environmental impacts.
We look at whole systems. So we don't want to just look at one
element of a piece of technology and its environmental impact.
We wanna look at the whole system and the other thing we really kind of
push for is trying to use this as a kind of catalyst for innovation
and people often think about sustainability is meaning not doing
stuff, turning stuff off, whereas actually what we can do is find better ways
of doing things by innovating. So jigna relatively
you're quite a small team within BBC R&D
can you tell us about the multiple projects you've got going on?
Yeah. So it's a really big area very broad area.
So we've got quite a lot of different strands of work going on
as we talked about we do a lot of work modelling our systems.
So for example, on the TV radio front, another strand is looking
at embedding sustainable design into the work of R&D.
We have a tool and a project called which we've called FOREST,
which is basically doing kind of screening environmental assessments,
trying to help us understand across the whole of R&D's
workplan Where the biggest impacts are.
We're also looking at R&D's operations. So, for example
what can we do in terms of reducing our business travel
and then roll those changes out across the wider BBC estate.
So for the rest of this episode.
we're going to dig into the details of two of your projects. We're going to
look at energy use and TV and radio and have a look at your FOREST tool.
So, Chloe Fletcher is going to tell us a bit more about that work.
OK, Chloe you are a sustainability data scientist at BBC R&D and you've
been working on this project looking at the energy use of TV and radio.
Can you tell us all about it? Yes Sure. So fundamentally,
our main aim was to understand what the environmental impact is of TV
and radio for the BBC, so we did that by looking at quantifying how
much energy is needed to prepare and distribute and consume BBC
OK and are you able to share the results for specific BBC products
at all? So for like iPlayer and Sounds? So for BBC television and radio services
we actually found that this
used a non negligible amount of energy which was quite surprising.
So, BBC TV was found to use about 0.6 percent of UK energy use that year
and BBC Radio was about 0.1 percent, and when we convert that into
looking at the carbon footprint. So to really understand what the
environmental impact of those things are we found that collectively,
they use about 0.3 percent of UK carbon emissions.
So definitely not something we should ignore. And also when we
think about beyond the BBC and other media providers as well
you can see how that could really scale. That was one of the really
interesting things we found out and actually across both studies
we found that it was the consumption of content that was
the biggest driver of the energy overall. So for the television work
I think it was about 92 percent of the total energy was from consumer
devices or home networking equipment whereas for radio this was a bit
lower, but still at 73 percent, so still really, really high.
So Chloe were there any other objectives involved with the work?
Yeah. So our second objective was to understand
are there any differences in the delivery platforms that allow you
to access radio or TV content. When we were looking at TV
we found that DTT had the lowest impact overall in terms of the
energy footprint per hour of watching and similarly for radio
we found that DAB had the smallest impact overall per hour of listening.
And then when we're looking at the future energy consumption
so how these things change over the twenty year time period
that we modelled what we found was
if we switched off terrestrial satellite and just kept on iPlayer.
and cable, this is where we saw the biggest reduction in
the total energy. And for the radio work
we actually found the biggest reduction when we kept on just
DAB and iPlayer. So that was a really interesting finding as well for us.
And, actually I have, say one of the most surprising
things we saw within our study particularly for radio was that
it was the standby power of the devices that had the biggest impact, overall,
and just these things collectively made up 40 percent of the total energy across all the scenarios that
we looked at. And are your going to share the results publicly?
Yes so for TV and radio we have already published
White Papers for those. So the television
White Paper was published last year in October and or
in September and the radio work was published in October.
So, Chloe. In terms of development and innovation. We work at BBC
R&D we're developing lots of new things for the future.
You've developed FOREST tool with the sustainability team.
Can you tell us a bit about it? Absolutely.
So FOREST stands for footprint of R&D environmental screening tool.
And what that is, is an assessment tool or survey
that allows teams within R&D to evaluate the environmental impact
of technology that they may transfer out of the department.
So there's lots of intelligent and creative people working in R&D
on lots of really cool and exciting new technology products and services.
So we really think it's important to get a good grasp of what these
potential impacts could be early on in the design process because that's
the best opportunity to make changes that could lead to a reduction in
those impacts. Because things change, so much. You know,
projects mature, take different directions and they may be ready for
the transfer stage into another area. of
the BBC, so I guess it is really important to keep on top of
that and keep everyone engaged and sustainability.
So with the results you have gathered with the reports that you were feeding
back to the different teams, how did they find them?
You know were they surprised with the impact of their work?
One of the really key things that came out was actually how unknown
the environmental impact is of cloud computing.
So this has definitely been a priority area for us to do more
detailed modelling, provide some resources and disseminate that back
the department, but also throughout the BBC and to be honest, also the media industry.
This is a hot topic amongst them as well.
So we'll probably share our results with them. I just wonder, if
if a project team is developing some new technology that will enable a
fantastic novel media experience for audiences and it going to be adopted
on a really big scale is, if through the FOREST tool we
identify and through the feedback identify that there is a potential
negative impact on the environment will be told to stop what we're
doing and to down tools and don't make that thing any more?
Yeah, I definitely think that's a worry for teams that were going
to come in and say no like this absolutely cannot be done and shouldn't
be done. That's absolutely not what we want to do we don't want to
stifle innovation. We don't want to stifle creativity or you know,
things are going to change, whether we do it in R&D or whether we don't.
And what the important thing I think is not to stop things in its tracks
it really is just to understand what the environmental impacts are and
be faced with the fact that some of them might be negative and actually
actively work with the industry, manufactures, government, whoever
we can to mitigate those things and minimised as much as possible.
And that's a role. Essentially, and that's what we should
be doing as people who build responsible technology as a public
service broadcaster as well. We should be having that voice and that
influence and making sure that we make a positive change.
And how can we keep up with this fantastic work, Chloe?
So we have a page on the R&D website: Sustainable Engineering.
So you can always check in there. We publish any new papers that
we've got going or new activities, that would probably be the best way.
We're always willing to be contacted if people are interested in
seeing how they can incorporate some of the messages that
we've got into the work that they do. You could also check out
the work that we're doing in collaboration with DIMPACT
so you could follow DIMPACT group and see any outputs
that are coming out of there as well. Wow. You're incredibly busy Chloe.
So thank you so much for sharing the details of your work and
it's been great to have you here. Thank you very much.