Dear Energy Minister..

Duncan Everett, managing director at Optimal Monitoring, sets out his wish-list – on behalf of industry – for the Coalition’s new energy minister, John Hayes:

Now that Parliament is setting out its latest agenda, we urge you to bring new decisiveness to expectations, regulations and standards around energy efficiency and carbon reduction.

It is all very well setting ambitious targets, but the UK is destined to become a laughing stock because the measures taken so far have been too vague and too non-committal, draining companies’ enthusiasm for pressing on with aggressive changes to the way they plan and manage buildings and generally consume resources.

Complaints are rife among large businesses which invested early in environmental sustainability initiatives, but which soon learnt that these efforts were not being adequately recognised.

Repeated changes to the rules, a lack of transparency and an absence of penalties for those organisations lagging in their actions has diminished broader belief in any commitment to the cause. This in turn is undermining the credibility of UK government programmes and our national standing against EU and global targets.

 How much attention, if any, is being paid to the new carbon efficiency performance league table, for example, which ranks companies according to their compliance with the Carbon Reduction Commitment (CRC) Energy Efficiency Scheme? Where there are any strong feelings about it, the main concern is that the measures are inadequate and the rankings misleading - hardly the aim of the legislation!

Then there have been promises to relax some targets to stimulate market growth. As things stand, we are falling ever further behind against our targets and will soon be unable to make up the lost ground. The speculation that the new environment secretary Owen Paterson, is a ‘climate change’ sceptic, hardly helps matters.

 Legally, the UK now has a national requirement to reduce carbon emissions by 80% (compared to the level in 1990) by 2050, and interim targets are looming large; now there just needs to be some urgent and committed follow-through.

So what is to be done?

Focusing on reporting alone or expecting utility providers to provide all the answers is not enough. Energy companies are all too wrapped up in supply legislation and are rarely in any position to be creative. 

More needs to be done then to promote the role of emerging, specialist businesses focused on actually driving down consumption and carbon in real terms - and are actually getting results.

Businesses which should be a great British export, in an emerging, worldwide market bringing much needed money into the great British coffers, but yet are currently constrained by their own government’s legislation.

We are at a point where innovation is the only way we are going to get out of the current mess the UK finds itself in. Setting out legislation that panders to the energy companies - who have enough to do reducing carbon emissions in the supply chain - would be a disaster.

We hope that the Government will provide much greater clarity about how new CRC requirements will be measured and managed and consider how it will drive through the magnitude of improvements it has promised.

Procrastination and political wrangling is detracting from other important factors associated with CRC targets too, namely that more frugal use of resources means easy cost savings - for all parties.  

Clear information is the most important tool here - and appealing to business purses in the current climate means driving home just how much money is being hemorrhaged through poor carbon management, and the direct consequences that will be imposed if those responsible don’t get their houses in order.

Improved energy efficiency is one of the easiest all-round win-wins, and it starts with information - not massive capital investment. Once people have a means of monitoring their energy consumption and can see what they’re wasting needlessly, that’s often the only wake-up call they need.

Energy efficiency, through closer monitoring and reporting of existing consumption, enables direct savings - releasing cash that can be invested elsewhere. And there’s nothing like some cold hard figures highlighting real wastage to shock even the most apathetic into more urgent action.