Carbon Connect Conference: The Future of Business Energy Efficiency Policy

On 18 October in Portcullis House, parliamentarians, civil servants and key low carbon industry stakeholders came together for a Carbon Connect event focusing on the latest developments in business energy efficiency policy.

The first session gave delegates a chance to look back at Carbon Connect’s March report ‘Energy Efficiency: The Untapped Business Opportunity’. Laura Sandys MP, a member of the Energy and Climate Change Select Committee, chaired the session and opened it by saying that “efficiency is one of those issues [in the energy debate] that get left behind…. What gets left even further behind is the contribution that businesses can make to energy efficiency, their own bottom line and greening our economy. Carbon Connect’s recommendations clearly state that we [businesses and policymakers] have quite a lot left to do.”

Julius Brinkworth, industry expert and co-chair of that inquiry group, gave a presentation on the report’s recommendations and resultant policy developments. Addressing attitudes to energy consumption, Julius began by re-iterating one of the main findings from the inquiry, that “energy efficiency is hugely under-utilised in businesses.” He went onto describe the “feeling of apathy” that businesses have toward efficiency measures, before highlighting a lack of policy support for them.

“We look at infrastructure change, we look at renewables, we look at the national grid and how we’re going to change that. But actually, with just day-to-day efficiency for business, there’s very little out there.” Julius Brinkworth


Summing up, he emphasised the economic potential of energy efficiency, “reversing the kind of trend that we have in energy efficiency will create a huge amount of opportunity for UK skills, supports manufacturing and stimulates UK business and will help us to become competitive in a global market for these types of systems, so I think there is a massive opportunity.”

Lindsay Harris, Deputy Director of Sustainable Business and Resource Efficiency at Defra, made a contribution to the discussion based on the work undertaken by his department aimed at improving corporate greenhouse gas emissions reporting. He began by summarising the tenor of 2000+ responses that the department had to their consultation on the matter earlier this year. “The majority of responses were in favour of mandatory reporting for all large companies. There was a significant minority who supported a voluntary approach, including the majority of trade associations.” He then went on to express the reservations that businesses felt around the issue, “although they [many businesses] supported mandatory reporting in principle, they did so in the context of wanting to see the simplification of other current reporting requirements.” Lindsay further expanded on this point, saying “one of the things that came out of our consultation was that if the government does bring forth mandatory emissions reporting, the CRC league tables will become superfluous, and you certainly don’t need both because they produce similar sorts of information, that’s the argument that’s been put and ministers have heard that.”

The second session started with Steve Barker, Head of Energy Efficiency and Environmental Care at Siemens UK, talking about the benefits of a holistic energy improvement scheme, saying “the savings with this [systematic assessment of energy efficiency] are 4 times more than just taking an ad-hoc approach.” He also detailed the difficulties companies have with environmental policies, “Managing policy and regulatory compliance has, in recent years, become a real headache for most private sector organisations.” Finally, Steve set out what UK companies need from policymakers in order to kick-start investment in the area, “Risky business investment in green technology is really what we don’t want...organisations need clear, consistent, and coherent legislation.” He also stressed the need for good information to support business decisions.

“At the moment there are 43 organisations where you can go and get some kind of advice [on energy management]; government, quasi-automonous government organisations, private sector orgasnisations. And at the moment, businesses are really confused as to where to go to get authoritative advice.” Steve Barker


Greg Lavery, Principle at Booz, then outlined what the main policy tools for energy efficiency are, “we see three big levers around the world on energy efficiency: those are performance standards, project encouragement [incentive schemes, league tables etc], and thirdly improving the energy efficiency economics [Carbon taxes, etc].” He continued by talking about his experience of policies adopted in other parts of the world, and the comparative benefits of mandatory schemes “[CEO’s] have found cost savings that they didn’t even know were in the business”, versus voluntary schemes, which he called “largely ineffective”.

Following this, Tom Bastin, Head of EU and International Energy Efficiency at DECC, gave an overview of EU policy proposals on energy efficiency. He detailed concerns within the EU that member states would miss 2020 energy saving targets by between 50-60%, and how this led to a draft directive being created by the Commission. He then outlined the main effects that the proposed direcitve could have on business, “it has the scope to cut across the grain of existing and planned UK policy in this area…article 7 of the directive requires all large companies to undertake an energy audit every three years.” Finally, Tom speculated on the possible timetable for the directive, “we expect the pace to step up under the Danish presidency in the first half of next year; they’ve said that making progress on this dossier will be a priority for them…we’d be looking at the rollout of provisions contained around 2014.”

This event was supported by Siemens.