On the 3rd of December, 2024, ep Group founder and Managing Partner, Steven Fawkes, was on a panel at the Anticipate London event called 'Enhancing Energy Efficiency'.
The panel, moderated by BCC journalist David McClelland, included; Charlotte Harrington, Co-CEO of Belu Water, Raquel Queral, CEO of The Green Landlady, and Sue Riddlestone MBE, CEO Bioregional and non-executive Director Future Homes Lab.
Steven gave his perspective on energy efficiency, gained through four decades working in the field, and commented on what had changed in that time and what had not changed.
The two things that haven’t changed are the potential and barriers.
"The potential for cost-effective energy efficiency remains huge, probably 30%-40% of energy consumption at any one time could be eliminated by better management and profitable investments – this is equivalent to reserves in Oil and Gas industry language. In total, globally, these reserves would be worth $3 to $4 trillion a year in savings if we ‘extracted’ them.The second thing that has stayed the same is that efficiency remains largely invisible because it is many, many small heterogeneous measures, unlike offshore wind for example. Despite there being massive reserves, it is hard to extract for many reasons, small scale investments, lack of capacity, hard to measure, organisational issues like landlord-tenant problem – and it is hard for politicians to have their photo taken in front of energy efficiency. The surprising fact is that despite being the Cinderella of energy policy, energy efficiency has delivered more energy services over the last 40 years than any other source of renewables, 3x that delivered by renewables. That is little known but worth repeating."
Dr Steven Fawkes, Managing Partner, ep group
Steven went on to discuss three things that have changed for the better, and some of the implications of the changes:
“The dramatic fall in the costs of solar and batteries, as well as the electrification of heat and mobility. These mega-trends have made distributed energy, behind the meter generation much more viable. Although fundamentally energy efficiency is about energy in per unit of service delivered e.g. comfortable temperature in a building, the question is at what level of the system do we count energy efficiency. Traditionally we have thought about energy efficiency being all about the building’s efficiency but by installing solar and batteries we probably don’t change the energy in at all. What we do change is the overall energy efficiency of the energy system and the country which is tremendously helpful in many ways. So what we are seeing is an evolving definition of energy efficiency which includes distributed behind the meter solar and batteries reducing grid demands with all the knock on effects that has.”
“The next change is how we evaluate energy efficiency projects. It used to be all about payback, spend £1,000 save £300 a year, voilà, a 3 year payback. Now, we are much more aware of the multiple benefits of energy efficiency which can include: better health, better educational outcomes, increased building value, reduced rental voids etc. etc. And importantly we are seeing them built into the business cases. And the significant thing here is that these non-energy benefits are often more strategic, and therefore more likely to get approval from decision makers than projects that only rely on savings and payback. Savings are boring, strategic advantages are attractive.”
“The third positive thing is that institutional capital is waking up to efficiency, particularly in real estate. They haven’t all got their heads around it yet but they are getting there and there is some cutting edge work going on e.g. using for instance satellite data and AI to assess opportunities for efficiency in large portfolios.”
Steven summed up by saying these changes made him more positive about energy efficiency and its ability to deliver real savings, multiple benefits, and reduce carbon emissions, than at any time during his career.d b
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