Looking out from my second-floor office window a few weeks ago I saw 10 sleek new solar photovoltaic (PV) panels being installed onto a near-neighbour’s south-facing house. Not that I spend all my time gazing out of the window, but this set me thinking about what we, as informed individuals working in energy in our professional lives, can also do in our home lives to move the transition forward.

My near neighbours must have decided to invest a considerable sum in getting the PV hardware onto their roof – along with, no doubt, less visible inverters and control equipment. If it has all gone according to plan, they will now be paying smaller electricity bills, having removed at least some of their electricity load from the power grid and replaced it with homegrown green power.

Citizen power – I see that the now not-so-new Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net Zero in the UK, Ed Miliband, says that citizens will be among those to be mobilised, alongside businesses, trade unions, civil society and local government to support the new UK government in its national effort to ‘make Britain a clean energy superpower with zero carbon electricity by 2030’.

My citizen neighbours are ahead of the game in greening their own electricity supply. They may also contribute to greening the wider electricity system if their new PV system exports excess power to the grid.

The other supply-side area for UK householders to tackle is, of course, home heating – where our almost ubiquitous fossil gas-fired boilers are to be replaced, eventually, with electric heat pumps, district heating connections or other solutions. I have seen less evidence, locally, of heat pumps being installed in nearby gardens so far, but no doubt these are on their way.

The greenest, and cheapest, energy of all is that which is not needed, not delivered, not used.

Concentrate on the demand side 
Later, looking at my latest energy bill, I was struck by the sophisticated monitoring options offered to domestic energy users by modern suppliers.

Our consumption data is now automatically sent to the supplier via smart meters and returned to us for analysis. Suppliers differ in how far they go, but mine offers hours of fun comparing gas and electricity usage per hour, day or month with past consumption patterns. It’s easy to see how big the overnight electricity load is, the effects of going away for a week and, during the summer with the gas space heating switched off, I believe I can spot the days when a bath was run in this house.

Monitoring is just the start, of course – active energy management comes next but, with all this data, householders have all they need to alter their behaviour, and patterns and scheduling of energy use.

Customers of some of the more go-ahead suppliers can also choose a supply contract tailored to their use patterns; for example, reduced rates for off-peak charging of electric vehicles. Those with their own PV panels and, even better, with a domestic battery, may be able to switch some of their electricity use away from expensive peak times.

Why does whole system energy efficiency matter for net zero?
It’s easy to be dazzled by shiny new supply-side options for homes, and imagine that boring old energy efficiency is somehow less important these days. But, as we all know, the most impactful thing we energy users can do to contribute to net zero is to use less of the stuff. The greenest, and cheapest, energy of all is that which is not needed, not delivered, not used.

Research backs this up: the potential savings available from maximising energy efficiency ‘far exceed’ those available from individual technologies – according to a 2018 paper: How big is the energy efficiency resource? from Amory Lovins at the US Rocky Mountain Institute.

Lovins writes about the many types of energy efficiency, starting with extraction efficiency as material in the ground is turned into primary fuels; through conversion and distribution and transmission processes with varying efficiencies; to end-use efficiency by the customer. If we use a whole-system approach, then ‘artfully choosing, combining, sequencing and timing fewer and simpler technologies can save more energy, at lower cost, than deploying more and fancier but dis-integrated and randomly timed technologies’.

So, let’s install rooftop PV, heat pumps and whatever else does the job on the supply side at home but, as Lovins adds, climate protection also depends on deploying the entire energy efficiency resource, focusing less on individual technologies and more on the whole energy supply/use system. A message that New Energy World’s energy professional readers will understand well, at home as well as at work.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are strictly those of the author only and are not necessarily given or endorsed by or on behalf of the Energy Institute.

• Further reading: ‘Investing in energy efficiency is key to meeting climate goals’. As the International Energy Agency has clearly stated, we need to double the rate of energy efficiency progress and triple total renewable power capacity by 2030. Today, energy efficiency is the single largest measure the world can take to reduce energy demand, and can provide around one-third of all emission reductions.
• Cold, damp, shoddily-built properties blight millions of British lives. Yet opportunities abound to do something better, and there are great examples of forward-thinking building and retrofit, using fabric and design that create far warmer homes, their energy use greatly reduced. Why is there not far more of this, and what is the UK government doing about it?