Nigel Jollands

Nigel Jollands, the head of the energy efficiency unit at the International Energy Agency gave a presentation today at the Crawford School. He talked about three main ideas the first of which was the relationship between changes in energy use, changes in well-being, changes in energy efficiency. This diagram is a revised version of his:

The y-axis is the percentage change in well-being, the x-axis the percentage change in energy use. All points on the top left have rising energy intensity because wellbeing is rising faster than energy use and all points on the bottom right falling energy intensity because well-being is not rising as fast as energy use. His point was that people often have preconceptions about energy efficiency, thinking that increasing energy efficiency must mean falling energy use or falling well-being. Neither is the case.

Of course, the whole point of my Hub project is that energy efficiency is more complicated than this and shouldn't be measured by energy intensity