I had a great trip to Ireland recently, speaking at the IERC conference and getting updated on the various private and public energy efficiency initiatives. Ireland is really making impressive strides to improve energy efficiency.

In February the government published its second National Energy Efficiency Action Plan (NEEAP) which highlighted the potential benefits to Ireland, a country that imports c.88% of its energy and has ageing power infrastructure. In the first NEEAP in 2009 the government estimated that by implementing the NEEAP Ireland could save €2.36bn, generate 5,000 jobs, a critical issue in Ireland, reduce energy use by 32,000 GWh and reduce emissions by 7.7 mt of GHG emissions.

The NEAAP set a target of 20 per cent savings across the economy and a target of 33 per cent saving in the public sector by 2020. The plan includes 97 specific actions and these include: obliging the public sector to address consumption, procurement and reporting of energy use, writing guidelines on Energy Performance Contracts (EPC), the establishment of an €70 m energy efficiency fund with €35 m being invested by the government, and establishing a domestic and non-domestic Pay as You Save (PAYS) schemes.

Another interesting initiative is the International Energy Research Centre (IERC), based at the Tyndall National Institute in Cork. IERC is a vehicle for co-operative research backed by an impressive number of large multi-nationals including United Technologies, General Motors, IBM, Alcatel-Lucent and HSG Zander and local companies such as Bord Gais. The IERC brings together industrial partners with academic institutions to undertake collaborative research in integrated sustainable energy system technologies. The IERC is already supporting a number of collaborative, industry-academia research projects driven by real industrial needs and has recently attracted additional support. The idea is to carry out research, use Ireland as a test bed and then use the technology developed in international markets.

Ireland is a small country at the edge of Europe but judging from the National Energy Efficiency Action Plan and other initiatives such as IERC it is quietly taking a leadership role in Europe in energy efficiency.

The New Buildings Institute (NBI) in the USA turned 15 years old in April. The NBI is a non-profit ‘working to improve the energy performance of commercial buildings. The NBI has two very interesting initiatives that deserve wider attention, ‘Getting to 50’ i.e. achieving savings of at least 50 per cent compared to current building code (regulations) and ‘Zero Energy’, which is about getting to net zero energy buildings, i.e. buildings that consume no more energy in a year than they produce. Even the ‘getting to 50’ is an ambitious goal, getting to net zero even more so. So on their 15th birthday it is interesting to look at how things are going with both of these really useful initiatives but particularly net zero energy.

A recent report released by the NBI summarized the progress on net zero buildings and took a first look at costs and features of these buildings. The report covered 21 buildings with sufficient data to analyze, 15 of which had actual results and 6 with modeled consumptions. They covered most climate zones in the US and a wide range of buildings including offices, schools and sports facilities. They were small, generally less than 15,000 ft2 but this is representative of the US building stock. The total number of net zero energy (or zero energy capable) buildings in the US is expected to reach 100 by the end of 2013.

The average Energy Use Intensity (EUI) for US commercial buildings is 93 kBTU/ft2. The least efficient of the 21 buildings had an EUI of 35kBTU/ ft2 – i.e. 62% less than the average. The most efficient achieved EUIs of about 10% of the average – i.e. energy consumptions 90% less than the average.

The techniques used included; integrated design, extensive use of day lighting, high efficiency envelopes, high efficiency glazing and advanced heating and ventilating systems and all the buildings included photovoltaic solar systems. All the technologies used were widely available and not particularly innovative in themselves. As energy used for heating and lighting is reduced, the proportion used for plug loads is increased and more effort is then needed to reduce this through both design and better operations.

Measuring incremental costs of buildings is notoriously difficult but it is possible to measure actual costs and compare them to other buildings. The NBI concluded that incremental costs were in the range of 0 to 10% but less than the modeled costs, with paybacks less than 11 years. It is likely that more experience in design teams and the supply chain will reduce costs and there are now plenty of examples where integrated design can reduce total costs.

The NBI’s programmes and reports show that designing and building real buildings with net zero, or close to net zero energy use is possible and possible at low (or possibly even zero) costs. What is needed to make it happen more widely is more clients who see the possibilities and the advantages in reduced life cycle costs, and designers schooled in integrated design and appropriate technologies. More aggressive improvements in building codes (regulations) would of course have a major part to play.

It was good to see that The Independent had a big piece on fusion power on Saturday ‘One giant leap for mankind: £13bn Iter project makes breakthrough in the quest for nuclear fusion, a solution to climate change and an age of clean, cheap energy’) as fusion hadn’t had much press coverage in the last few years. Once seen as the inevitable future of energy supply, fusion – aka ‘the power of the sun’ – is still seen by many as the holy grail, offering unlimited, clean and cheap power. In fact, the famous quote about nuclear power being ‘too cheap to meter’ (made by Lewis Strauss, Chairman of the US Atomic Energy Commission in 1954 and frequently repeated in the 1950s and 1960s) actually referred to the promise of fusion power rather than any reality of conventional nuclear fission power.

The Independent article was covering the ITER project, a huge and important £13 billion multi-national project to advance fusion research. ITER is the latest in a long line of fusion experiments that create very high temperature plasma and contain it in a toroidal, ‘doughnut’ shaped vessel using magnetic fields to prevent the plasma touching the containment vessel. These vessels are gently called Tokamaks, a term coined in Soviet Russia after they were invented by Igor Tamm and the great Andrei Sakharov, who designed the Soviet thermonuclear bombs and later went on to win the 1975 Nobel Peace Prize after becoming a dissident.

Fusion research, however, has a very long history of being used to feed dreams of unlimited and clean nuclear power. Even if ITER is successful and produces the planned 10 times as much power as it consumes it is a long way from a commercial fusion reactor, if it is ever achieved. ‘First plasma’ (not the same as actual fusion) is planned for 2022 (2 years later than the last plan – and 6 years after the original planned start-up date) and this will be followed by a gradual ramping up of power and ‘going nuclear’ with the injection of tritium in 2027/28 (on the current plan). Even if ITER achieves the 10 times as much power as it consumes goal it will always remain an experimental tool. (By the way this often quoted10 times ratio is mis-leading as it means 10 x as much heat produced as power in – not 10 x as much power out as power in). Even on the optimistic scenario a commercial fusion reactor is unlikely before 2050 and it seems that physicists have been predicting that ‘fusion is 40 years away’ for many years and even decades.

ITER is an incredible project and we do need to carry on with these kinds of experiments, if only to better understand how the universe works, but we also need to be realistic about the prospects for commercial fusion power. Headlines such as ‘ITER makes breakthrough in fusion power’ are very misleading when all that has happened is that construction has started.

The ‘clean’ aspect of nuclear comes for the fact that the fusion reaction combines isotopes of hydrogen (deuterium and tritium, abbreviated to D and T) to produce isotopes of helium which sounds great as hydrogen and helium are fairly innocuous until you remember that the D-T reaction produces a very high neutron flux, i.e. a large flow of high energy neutrons, something like 100 times as high a flux as that produced in a conventional fission reactor. This neutron flux will irradiate whatever materials are used to contain the plasma, making them radioactive. When the JET project, a forerunner of ITER in Culham in Oxfordshire, ran a single series of D-T tests the vacuum vessel was sufficiently irradiated that it required remote handling for a year. The materials problems of fusion reactors are immense. The containment vessel, as well as being irradiated with an extremely high flux of neutrons, has to withstand extremely high thermal loads as the plasma is at very high temperatures (more than 100 million oC no less). Even if the problems of materials can be solved it is impossible to realistically predict the costs of fusion power 40 years from now and it has to be said that the track record of the nuclear industry on cost prediction is abysmal.

I am a technological optimist but on fusion, at least conventional ‘big science’ Tokamak based fusion I am pessimistic. Every now and then reports surface of unconventional fusion developments emerge. In February 2013 It was reported that the Lockheed Skunk works (famous in aerospace circles as the developer of spy planes, the U-2 and the still incredible after fifty years SR-71), is working on a 100 MW, “trailer sized” fusion plant with the first prototype predicted for 2017 and commercial units by 2022 (here). Like a lot of these stories you have to be sceptical but as I have said before, the one certainty is that the future won’t look like the conventional scenarios predict, and I would be less surprised by an ‘out of the box’, completely novel new technology than I would be by the Tokamak approach producing a commercial fusion reactor by 2050. Maybe we will be using fusion power by then.

An interesting piece in the Sunday Times today headlined “Grid to get switch to your fridge’ nearly caused me to choke on my coffee. It starts with the sentence, ‘Fridges, freezers and ovens could be automatically switched off in homes across the country as part of new plans to reduce energy consumption’ before going on to explain that proposals to the European parliament will ensure that appliances are fitted with remote switches that will enable them to be switched off remotely when ‘the UK’s generators struggle to meet demand for electricity’. David Davis, the Conservative MP apparently told the Mail on Sunday, ‘There is a Big Brother element to this and it shows the energy suppliers passing down their incompetence to the customers. They should be supplying energy as customers need it, not when they want to give it.’ So what is it all about and should we be worried?

Proposals to remotely control appliances to manage demand have been around for decades as part of so-called ‘smart grid’ initiatives. Managing demand to match supply is already practiced in industry and commerce through market mechanisms whereby consumers are paid to switch off load at times of peak demand – so called load management or demand response. Paying consumers to switch off load is cheaper overall for the system than increasing supply at times of peak demand and therefore benefits everyone. It also has an environmental benefit as units of power not used (‘saved’) don’t have any environmental impact whereas units generated by standby generators, or power stations on hot standby have a relatively high environmental impact. Through market mechanisms the benefits are shared between producer and consumer.

Fridges and freezers are thermal stores and can be switched off for short periods without any significant impact on the internal temperatures. In any future electricity market regime we need to see greater balance between the supply side (generation) and the demand side (energy efficiency and demand response) and ‘smart’ appliances that can be controlled remotely could play a significant role in this. At times of peak demand millions of fridges and freezers could be turned off for short periods (subject to internal temperature over-rides) without anyone noticing any effects or any food safety issues. The technology is relatively straight-forward, the rationale is clear – what is missing is an attractive business model that makes it stack up and attractive to consumers. The business model could be based on cheaper or even free appliances (subsidized by the demand response payments from the grid) or selling appliances with a cheque paid to the consumer every time demand response is triggered. Such business models would prove highly attractive and involve people in their energy system much more than at present.

The right business model requires the right regulations in place and this is why energy efficiency and demand side advocates are still working to ensure there are demand side mechanisms in the Electricity Market Reform (EMR). If the regulations are appropriate then new business models could appear.

So, is having a remote switch in your fridge or freezer really a sign of Big Brother on the horizon? Well it could be if there was no choice in when the switch was used or if the consumer does not share in the benefits but that seems highly unlikely. With the right regulation and the right business model it could prove to be a very popular business proposition.

There is still often confusion about what we really mean by energy efficiency. It is a phrase that comes with a lot of baggage and associations with doing less and sacrifice – the old idea of ‘energy conservation’. It even gets confused with renewable energy sometime which is strange given renewables are a means to generate energy and not a way to improve efficiency.

First of all ‘energy’ itself in the way that we use it today is a relatively modern and confusing term – we should really talk of fuel and electricity as they are very different and incompatible sources of services – you can’t put petrol in your laptop. Physicists and engineers also know that energy is always conserved in any process so the terms, ‘energy conservation’, ‘saving energy’ and even ‘consuming energy’ are technically incorrect.

The term ‘energy efficiency’ incorporates two concepts. The first is energy efficiency in its technical sense – useful energy out/energy in – which is usually reported as a percentage – and can only be applied to devices that convert one type of energy to another such as engines (chemical energy to motion), electric motors (electricity to motion) or light bulbs (electricity to light). The second concept is energy productivity, usually reported as energy in/useful output, which applies to passive devices such as buildings which convert energy into other services such as comfort. We are familiar with some everyday measurements of energy productivity, such as miles per gallon or litres per 100 kilometre for car fuel efficiency and others including energy input to a building per square metre to produce a certain temperature for a certain period of time; energy use per passenger mile for aircraft; or energy per one thousand tins of beans produced in a factory. So what we normally call ‘energy efficiency’ is really a combination of energy efficiency in its technical sense and energy productivity.

Just to add to the story, when we commonly talk about energy efficiency in a macro-sense we often mean a series of processes rather than a status at a single point in time. The energy efficiency of all technologies tends to improve over time because there is a basic human desire to spend less, invent new technologies and improve existing technologies. As well as the constant incremental technological (and behavioural) changes, there are the major paradigm-busting changes such as a compete change of an industrial process that work to improve energy efficiency over time.

So to sum up, the phrase ‘energy efficiency’ is a combination of technical energy efficiency and energy productivity, and it is also a process of continuous improvement.