Energy Efficiency 2015

Two particular themes run through this second annual energy efficiency supplement to Energy World and Petroleum Review – finance and investment issues, and human behaviour. As we highlight in the opinion piece from Dr Steven Fawkes over the page, the main barriers to success for today’s energy efficiency projects are certainly not of a technical nature; rather, getting schemes financed and developing a fuller understanding of how people can make the best possible job of cutting consumption are more pressing areas to progress.

Improving energy efficiency is, of course, widely recognised as the best and most cost-effective method of cutting both energy costs and dangerous greenhouse gas emissions from energy use. Yet the subject, though now fully mature, still doesn’t necessarily receive the attention – or finance – that it deserves.

Hence this supplement. The Energy Institute (EI) works to serve both the supply and demand sides of the international energy industry and is itself very active in energy efficiency matters. Therefore we include articles from the EI on the latest UK efficiency scheme, ESOS (page 6); the ‘culture’ of energy management (page 13); and how to develop a career as an Energy Manager (page 20). The ESOS material is very timely as we approach the first compliance date in December.

This year we pull out some of the energy efficiency messages from the EI Energy Barometer survey of EI members – see the four-page section starting on page 9 – which shows that both demand-side specialists and other energy professionals are convinced of the need for greater efforts into efficiency.

Moving on from the UK, we include articles on energy efficiency in both Europe and the US. The EU is widely thought to be a world leader in this area, but the article from Stefan Scheuer on page 4 suggests there is a long way to go before Europe has successfully placed energy efficiency at the heart of its processes. Meanwhile, the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy, which has charted considerable progress on the other side of the Atlantic for 35 years, sees scope for greater energy improvements in the future – see page 18. Last, the people angle. An article on page 14 explores a study into how people actually carry out energy efficiency tasks in a large, live setting – Tesco stores across the country; while on page 19 we include practical tips on data management for multi-site programmes.

Energy efficiency has come a long way, but there’s plenty of scope to do much more with the 'fifth fuel'.