Recently I attended a web cast where the topic was on energy efficiency.
The author made a number of provocative statements but the main message was that since improvements in energy efficiency have been a constant effort in the past decades, are we running out of the potential for further improvement? For many, energy efficiency is seen as one of the crucial elements of achieving a sustainable energy use. But, unfortunately, as soon as we make something more efficient (refrigerator, vehicle engine..), soon after we strive for bigger of the same. Refrigerators are huge today, our car and SUV engines are ever more powerful. How do we know know how much refrigeration space we really need? Perhaps our European counterparts can teach us something?
I say that one of the ways to actually make a mark on the environment is to adopt more energy efficient practices, technologies and solutions. For example, in the building industry, our current and currently developing housing stock is still way substandard and slow in adopting available energy efficient technologies and practices (insulation, windows, heating/cooling, passive solar building practices…). Since buildings are a biggest contributor to greenhouse gases, let’s start making them more efficient now.
