Ignore energy efficiency at your peril

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Dec 2, 2016

Ignore energy efficiency at your peril

Being more energy efficient brings many benefits.

I work in energy efficiency. No wait, don’t go. It’s exciting. In Australia you sometimes call it energy productivity, but it means the same thing: getting the most value (economic and social) out of the energy we use.

Productivity has more positive connotations than efficiency, but possibly only in the business community. It’s not so long ago that everyone used the term energy conservation. This clearly has a more negative feel – don’t use energy, conserve it. It goes with all those campaigns by government telling us to turn off the lights, turn down the heat, walk to school and eat healthy food.

For most people, neither term will exactly set them on fire; indeed nothing about energy policy ever will. I did read somewhere that the average person spends about 40 seconds per year thinking about energy issues, though I have no idea how they measure that.

But the change in terminology does illustrate an attempt to explain something that is very hard to explain – the energy you don’t use. And equally, to make it positive and interesting. ‘Selling´ energy efficiency has always been hard, and has always felt a bit preachy – a small group of zealous converts struggling to understand why no one else is excited about low energy lightbulbs and the latest developments in attic insulation.

And yet it matters to us all in our daily lives. Energy brings so many good things to all our lives – heat, comfort, the ability to travel. It charges our devices, cooks our food. And, of course, it powers our factories and offices and drives our economies. We don’t care about using energy, we care about the benefits using energy brings. In that sense, the more the better.

But using energy comes at a cost. Literally – the average Australian household spends well over $2,000 a year on gas and electricity – and more widely, the global economic, social and environmental costs of our growing energy use cannot be ignored. Local air pollution in homes and in cities causes six million premature deaths around the world each year. Globally, climate change, linked to our energy use, is fast becoming the existential issue of our time.

Making our energy systems secure, affordable and sustainable starts with energy efficiency. Even before we talk about new, clean sources of energy, let’s talk about eliminating waste. Our analysis shows that we are capturing less than a quarter of our total energy efficiency potential. We are all needlessly wasting our own money and the planet’s resources and capacities.

Being more energy efficient brings many benefits. More efficient homes are more comfortable and measurably healthier. Good quality, efficient, lighting enhances learning in schools and staff satisfaction in offices. Industry becomes more competitive, jobs and GDP get a boost.

Is it still boring? Two things are changing that might excite people at least a little. First of all, energy efficiency is going hi-tech. It’s not about turning stuff off anymore. Your car can tell your home you’ll be there in fifteen minutes, and please turn on the heat. You can set the temperature differently in every room in the house, and change it on your phone. Street lights can tell the city which parking spaces are free, and even check if the parkers have paid. Industrial systems are using big data and artificial intelligence to optimise themselves and anticipate problems before they happen. This changes the game as to how much more efficient we can become. It also changes how energy efficiency looks, and how it can be sold.

Secondly, there is global momentum behind energy efficiency. The world is becoming increasingly efficient every year. The biggest driver of that? China. Last year, China saved more energy than Japan used. The energy efficiency services market in China, which was zero fifteen years ago, now employs over half a million people and is worth US$13 billion per year – more than the rest of the world put together. The demand in China for services and technologies that can continue its drive for energy efficiency is a huge opportunity.

Energy efficiency – an essential part of all future energy systems, and key to delivering a sustainable, low carbon future – is now also a global, technology-oriented, fast-growing business sector. Ignore it at your peril.