Taking the foot off the brake

It is time to take energy efficiency seriously, writes Gerry Carrington.

You may have noticed occasionally that the car in front of you has its brake lights on a lot.

You think it must be stopping, but then you realise it is actually speeding up! So what's up?

Well, it could be a faulty brake light, but I think it is more likely the driver is using the brake pedal as a footrest.

Most people would recognise this practice as a bit daft and pretty wasteful. It's easy to avoid.

The driver just needs to keep their foot off the brake pedal, unless stopping.

It surprises most people to learn that, as a society, we are about as inefficient in the way we use energy as a driver with the brakes permanently applied.

Skip Laitner, a US economist, estimates the US wastes about 86% of the energy used in economic processes and considers New Zealand is probably the same.

This means we have the potential to live quite grandly yet consume just a fraction of the energy we currently use.

This would be a good thing, because improved consumer energy management and energy efficiency offer the best, quickest and cheapest ways to reduce energy greenhouse gas emissions, reduce the environmental impact of new energy supplies and improve human wellbeing.

As it happens, consumer energy efficiency improves naturally by about 1.3% per annum due to normal commercial processes, as people adopt new, more efficient products and services.

But economy-wide changes in consumer energy efficiency involve more than just changes in technology and behaviour; it's also about our expectations and culture.

And while society as a whole benefits from improved consumer energy efficiency, some individuals, organisations and firms don't take kindly to it and they do whatever they can to slow the process.

Another case of resting a foot on the brake pedal. So is 1.3% per annum the best we can do? Barry Barton, a law professor at Waikato University, thinks we can do better (Policy Quarterly, February 2013).

In California, for instance, energy efficiency is central in the state's energy law and policy and the results are obvious when you compare energy use in California with other US states.

By comparison with California, New Zealand's current National Energy Efficiency Conservation Strategy, published in 2011, is weak.

The target rate of improvement in energy intensity between 2010 and 2030 is just what you expect to occur naturally and there are no specific targets for improvement in the transport, business and public sectors.

Barton says ''This is not taking energy efficiency policy seriously; it must be unprecedented for a policy target to be the same figure as is expected without policy action ... we need the demand side and energy efficiency to have a more central place than they do now.''

So it looks as if New Zealand should be able to improve its energy efficiency by much more than 1.3% per annum. How are we going to do this?

I suggest we should stop using the brake pedal as a footrest for a start.

Emeritus Prof Gerry Carrington is a fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand and the Institution of Professional Engineers of New Zealand.

Each week in this column, one of a panel of writers addresses issues of sustainability.

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