A brief commentary on factors affecting implementation of energy efficiency in businesses
We are used to buying things – things we can drive, eat, watch… or services that help us get things done, but energy, now that’s a vague word.
And “efficiency” – That’s also a vague word. What does it mean? It’s so relative and hard to pin down, an ineffective marketing term for sure, especially in America where we are trained to like the big, the bold, the conflict ridden… where we like to blow things up, be the biggest and the best and the favorite pastimes are NASCAR and gladiator sports… come on!
So, clearly, from the get go, “energy efficiency” suffers from a serious marketing problem. If anyone can come up with better terminology, I’d like to hear it.
But let’s look at those factors commonly cited as hindering implementation of energy efficiency – I read lists like: “control and regulatory instruments”; “fiscal instruments and incentives”; economic and market-based instruments… or a bit less on the bureaucratese/pedantic side – “lack of knowledge of potential benefits”; “difficulty securing financing”; “lack of experienced workforce”, and etc.
In my experience with energy efficiency, focused on retrofit of buildings for “energy efficient (and comfortable) operation, the key single control factor affecting decision-making is confidence. Yes, CONFIDENCE. Indeed, this observation is well embedded in simple Keynesian economic theory that has, for example, the Great Depression rooted in a self-reinforcing slump in demand aka confidence born of failures in the financial sector to properly regulate itself. Sound familiar?
So what I see in the field are large numbers of businesspeople who are running on fear and uninterested in complex decision-making, difficult to understand forms and procedures, or in vague concepts like “efficiency” and “conservation”. What they mostly know about “energy” is that they’d like to have more of it for themselves… I can demonstrate all day that certain “energy efficiency” measures will “pay for themselves” in just a short time, but my business clients may just as well decide that they just don’t believe the numbers, they are too academic, and they simply do not have the confidence to spend now to save later.
Energy efficiency programs clearly need better marketing, to be simply presented, clear in results, and supported in extremely simple ways.
A plethora of competing programs, obscure and ever-changing paperwork, inconsistent policies and criteria, and a host of other practical problems further challenge us beyond the simple marketing problem to do better with implementing our need to move forward with energy efficiency.
It is generally acknowledged that energy efficiency presents a social least-cost alternative as a main component of our thrust toward a better future, one where we can live in the knowledge that we are doing the right thing, living in a healthy environment, in confidence. Not fear.
Yes, that’s a bit of ribald polemic, but that’s the order for the day… your comments welcome.