Energy Matters | Issue 8 | 2021
6
F E AT U R E www.elmhurstenergy.co.uk
The Future of Energy Efficiency Stuart Fairlie, Managing Director
When coming up with the title for this year’s conference, the team at Elmhurst quickly identified the ‘Future of Energy Efficiency’ as a very appropriate name. Carbon emissions, fuel prices, net zero, heat pumps, hydrogen, carbon capture, fuel security and energy efficiency are seemingly never ‘not’ in the news. To me, times have changed and ‘energy efficiency’ is central to all ambitions whether at the global scale, as at the UN Climate Change Conference in Glasgow, and at the national, regional and local level of governments.
The clamour for ways to measure performance of buildings and their occupants' behaviour is absolutely front and centre of the debate. The great news that people often misunderstand is that the UK is blessed with all of the answers. We know how to measure the buildings as we have the relevant methodologies. Many ‘experts’ will argue over the way to do things and in our opinion this doesn’t always help. We always advocate that you can’t criticise a model for failing to deliver the exact fuel bill of the family or business running the building when it is based on ‘average’ occupancy patterns and standard times and temperatures. This is why after understanding the ‘asset’, we always need to
provide the occupants with an ‘occupational’ assessment of the buildings, to predict what the fuel bill/emissions/energy use will be, whilst also being aware that this will not be correct either! But fear not, says I. We then need to use the metered data to help understand where any issues lie. It could simply be that we had an exceptionally cold winter, or that the occupants’ patterns changed, for example during COVID restrictions. If the underlying reason can’t be understood, experts can start diving into the detail: was a rogue immersion left on? Are heating programmers working correctly? Has some insulation been missed? etc.
