Welcome to Only Eleven Percent…

Welcome to my new website and blog!

It’s called ‘Only Eleven percent’ because, despite all our centuries of technological progress, we’ve reached the stunning global energy efficiency of about 11 per cent! In anyone’s books this is pretty poor progress. But it’s not so surprising when you think about how we built industrial society on cheap energy. What’s more most things are designed in a very traditional way and bought on lowest-first cost rather than lifetime costs. There are of course limits to how efficient we can make real machines but 11 per cent really is poor. The effects of this are huge; billions of pounds wasted (trillions globally); additional environmental impacts; the need to import more fuel which means less energy security; and big health effects in poorly heated, inefficient houses.

On this site I want to try to expand on what I think about energy efficiency; where we are; what the big stories really mean; what has worked elsewhere; what the future holds and why we should be bothered at all. I’m not an evangelist and I’m a pretty grounded person so you won’t find any sweeping statements or weird ideas. But because I’ve been in this industry a long time, I’ve got a great deal of information in my head that’s useful; I’ve got a good overview of the issue and challenges, technologies and processes, and the advent of the internet now means I can pass some of that on.

Improving energy efficiency, and specifically the rate of improvement, has so many advantages for individuals, organisations and nations, that it is sometimes hard to see why it is not given greater attention and resources than it currently receives. Energy Efficiency is important. It’s vital to all of us and it’s going to become more so as time goes on. The good news is that we can do something about it. We all have a choice about how energy efficient we are, our technologies, our organisations and our societies are – it is not out of our control. I hope that this blog will add to the debate, offer my opinions and perhaps help individuals and businesses, policy makers and stakeholders take a fresh look at energy efficiency and see how exciting the future could be.