The Energy Saving Trust (EST) is the independent, nationwide organisation focused on promoting action that leads to the reduction of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions - a key contributor to man-made climate change.

Funded by the UK government, devolved governments and the private sector, it offers individuals help tailored to their home type, circumstances and household budget. “We direct people to the right grants to make change happen, from cavity walls, to loft insulation and installing more renewable energy sources.”

On the corporate side, its programmes, guides and services to local councils, builders and fleet managers are also well-known and respected.

Philip Sellwood has been the Chief Executive of the Energy Saving Trust since 2003.
He has an extensive commercial background in the Retail, Food and Private Equity markets. He spent twenty years with Marks & Spencer, joining as a graduate in 1977 and working in almost every part of the business. He left M&S in 2000 as Director of Group Strategy. Philip has other strong retail experience, most recently as Commercial Managing Director for the Thresher Group (one of Europe’s largest retailers), where he was responsible for trading, buying, marketing and the supply chain.

In addition to strong private sector experience, Philip has demonstrated a real commitment to the public sector. During the last decade he has undertaken work with the DTI/Defra, for an educational charity and as Ministerial Advisor at the Home Office. He is currently a Non-Executive Director at the Improvement and Development Agency – which works closely with the Department for Community and Local Government. Philip also sits on the Editorial Board of Sustain magazine, is a member of the UKERC (UK Energy Research Centre) and sits on the Low Carbon Vehicle Partnership Board. He is a member of several influential Government Task Forces, including the Government & Industry 2016 Zero Carbon Housing Force, and as an Independent Commissioner to sit on the LGA Climate Change Commission.

Where does the Trust sit in the firmament of bodies aiming to help reduce carbon emissions?

“We are one of the UK's leading organisations set up to mitigate the damaging effects of climate change. We aim to cut carbon emissions - a contributor to climate change - by promoting the sustainable and efficient use of energy, water conservation and waste reduction. We are an independent, non-profit making organisation that acts as a bridge between government, consumers, trade, businesses, local authorities and the energy market.

“We are the source of free advice and information for people across the UK looking to save energy, travel sustainably and generate renewable energy. We also help people to conserve water and reduce waste.

“Our mission is to lead 60 million citizens to act on climate change by helping everybody use energy efficiently so that every home is a low carbon home.”

What EST services are particularly applicable to businesses and public corporations?

“With our unique position bridging governments and the private sector, the Energy Saving Trust works with a wide range of organisations, companies and local authorities aspiring to take steps to save carbon and help meet the governments’ goals.

“We work in collaboration with commercial organisations that show a genuine commitment to reducing the UK’s carbon emissions in the domestic sector by helping them engage their customers and employees to adopt low-carbon lifestyles.

“Our Energy Saving Recommended certification scheme includes helping manufacturers and retailers to promote energy-efficient lighting, electronic and insulation products.

“We provide technical guidance and solutions on energy efficiency and renewables to help UK housing professionals design, build and refurbish to high standards.

“Our advice, support and services are specifically designed to help local authorities meet their obligations under the new carbon dioxide emissions performance indicators. We also provide advice and support to housing associations and private landlords on renewables technologies and on making homes more energy efficient.

“We help businesses to reduce the carbon emissions and running costs associated with their fleet operations and help them to promote smarter / eco driving techniques to their employees.”

What role does the Trust play in the Government’s ‘Green Homes’ policy?

“The Energy Saving Trust were entrusted by the Government to develop and deliver the Prime Minister’s vision of a ‘Green Homes Service‘.

“ On 19 November 2007 the Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, announced a new one-stop Green Homes Service - accessible via a free ”Act on CO2” advice line, user-friendly website, and local advice centres based across the UK.

“The purpose was to provide people with easy access to a one-stop shop, providing high quality independent and impartial advice on ‘green’ issues, like energy efficiency, microgeneration, travelling sustainably, waste reduction and water conservation. Services on offer include a home energy audit as well as the signposting of green financial services.

“At the time of the announcement we already had a network of 49 Energy Efficiency Advice Centres in place across the UK that offered advice to householders on energy efficiency. This meant that the Energy Saving Trust not only had the expertise to develop the Green Homes Service, but crucially the experience to actually deliver it.

“Since then activity includes the re-launch of our advice network. We now have twenty-one advice centres in place across the UK offering advice on a range of ‘green’ issues including energy saving, microgeneration, ‘greener’ transport choices and in some cases waste reduction advice.

“Working with WRAP (Waste Reduction Action Programme) we have completed a pilot giving waste advice alongside our energy saving advice through our four of our centres and are currently evaluating the results whilst rolling out waste advice to some of the remaining advice centres in England, Wales and Northern Ireland.

“At the start of this year we began a three-year project with Waterwise, following the successful approval of an EU Life+ bid, to fund the piloting of a water advice service, the first of its kind in Europe. The main focus of the bid is to develop integrated energy and water saving advice, to be piloted in three urban areas - London, Edinburgh and Cardiff over this three year period.

“We have also developed and piloted a tailor-made, in-home and paid-for service called a ‘Home Action Plan’. Available in Buckinghamshire, East Berkshire, Oxfordshire and Milton Keynes, the Home Action Plan is an environmental audit of the homeowners home and lifestyle, and provides a clear set of recommendations and actions.

“All of our new advice services continue to be developed, refined and integrated into the Energy Saving Trust’s work.”

There’s been talk of ‘merging’ the EST and Carbon Trust: what’s your view?

“Talk of ‘merging’ with the Carbon Trust is unfounded and illogical. There is absolutely no duplication or crossover of activities with the Carbon Trust. The Energy Saving Trust’s focus is on householders, whilst the Carbon Trust supports and helps UK businesses to save energy.

“To avoid any replication or conflict of activities, the Chairman of the Carbon Trust sits on the Energy Saving Trust’s board and vice versa. We also have a partnership agreement to ensure that our corporate goals and objectives are complementary.

“The Energy Saving Trust has continued to deliver significant and increasing savings in CO2 emissions through its range of activities across the consumer, local authority, trade, community and business (fleet manager and small and medium enterprises (SMEs))audiences. Overall, our work has stimulated annual CO2 savings of nearly 1.2million tonnes and lifetime savings of over 24 million tonnes CO2 in 2007/08.”

As an independent body, does the Trust think Government carbon reduction targets are achievable?

“The new UK Climate Change Act together with the Scottish Climate Change Bill, and UK carbon budgets mean for the first time we have long-term binding goals, but radical change is needed to meet the targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 80 per cent by 2050.

“Our vision report, Emission Impossible? (released in July 2008) sets a marker in the sand on what we believe needs to happen to meet this ambitious CO 2 reduction target. Whilst it may sound like an impossible task, the report shows that we do not need to adopt austere lifestyles, or make unpleasant personal sacrifices. A low carbon lifestyle could in fact improve the quality of all of our lives.

“We don’t yet have all the answers on how we will achieve everything that we think will be necessary for a low carbon lifestyle but we do know that we need to act now. With the household sector accounting for 40 per cent of total carbon emissions, we can achieve a lot through energy efficiency. If we are going to reach the targets set by government then we are going to have to make it easier for people.

“A good illustration of this is the new Energy Performance Certificate for homes when they are sold or rented. We want it to be “a must” that the energy efficiency of the worst performing homes is improved before they are sold or rented.”

Of what carbon reduction projects are you personally most proud?

“The rolling out on time and on budget of a national one-stop Energy Saving advice network giving universal access to advice on energy saving, microgeneration, transport and in some cases waste reduction and water conservation.”

Where do you put the carbon-reduction emphasis: individuals, businesses or local and national government?

“It’s hard to put the carbon reduction emphasis down to one sector as surely it’s only by each sector playing their part that we can see the reductions necessary. For our organisation, we focus on the consumer (household) as the primary audience of Energy Saving Trust activities - reaching people directly through our advice centres, the website and advertising or indirectly through local authorities, housing associations or trade partners.”

What’s top of your in-tray at this moment?

“When I can reach it, considering the role the Energy Saving Trust will play in helping deliver the outcomes of the Government’s Heat & Energy Saving Strategy.”

Any advice for fellow carbon-reduction professionals?

“Keep a relentless focus upon implementing deliverable and measurable carbon reducing outcomes. Don’t get too fascinated by the process: it can waste huge amounts of your time.”

www.energysavingtrust.org.uk

Carbon Capture And Storage – A Missed Opportunity?

Inevitably, the move to a low carbon economy on a global scale contains uncertainties but of one thing we can be sure – it’s going to take time. Yet, according to environmental scientists time is not something we have a great deal of if we are to avoid the worst effects of climate change.

Even the most optimistic forecasts suggest that reducing consumption and developing renewable energy sources will leave us short of our energy requirement, or failing to make the emissions reductions that are necessary. “The hope is that renewables will take over from hydrocarbons, but the prospect of renewables growing fast enough is just untenable,” says Ian Phillips, Director, CO2DeepStore Ltd, a company that sees commercial opportunities in Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS).

To Phillips – and many observers without an obvious commercial interest – CCS seems to be the missing ingredient. Broadly, it covers a range of processes for removing CO2 from flue gases, and transporting it to a secure storage site. Although the technical and economic feasibilities have yet to be tested on a large scale, the individual steps are reasonably well understood. If CCS can be made to work it will mitigate the destructive effects of continuing to burn oil, gas and coal while we make the transition to non-fossil fuels.

Recent analysis by McKinsey suggests that a single large-scale CCS plant could provide around 1.5 million households with low carbon electricity, roughly equivalent to 1,400 wind turbines, which of course work at full capacity only sporadically. But to other observers CCS could be a potentially dangerous distraction from the main priorities – reducing consumption and developing renewable energy sources. CCS is as yet unproven, we do not have the safeguards needed to ensure safe implementation, and it prolongs our dependence on fossil fuels just at the time we should be weaning ourselves off them, or so it is argued.

An opportunity for the UK?

For the UK, CCS could deliver significant economic opportunities at an international level, as well as helping us to cut our emissions at home. Somewhat fortuitously, our exploitation of oil and gas reserves in the North Sea may provide us with some of the tools we need to dispose of large quantities of CO2 safely.

Depleted oil and gas fields may provide suitable storage locations, while the pipeline infrastructure needed to transport gases over long distances is well understood, albeit for extraction rather than storage. Our geology is well suited to the latter, with the possibility of storing CO2 in saline aquifers, large volumes of water-bearing rock located deep underground. “The UK has extraordinarily favourable geology, particularly in the North Sea and the Irish Sea,” says Roland Clift, Professor of Environmental Technology at the University of Surrey. “The Norwegians have been doing it for 12 years – I feel amazement that it’s taken so long to be taken seriously here,” he says.

Some gas reserves in the North Sea gas naturally contain high levels of CO2, which have to be reduced after extraction, and so producers already have some knowledge of CO2 removal processes. For example, since 1996, Norway’s Statoil has been removing about 2,800 tonnes of carbon dioxide daily from gas produced by the Sleipner West field and injecting it into an aquifer rather than releasing it to the air. The 250 metre thick aquifer has the capacity to store 600 billion tonnes of CO2, enough to house emissions from all the power stations in Europe, according to Statoil. The location of the liquid CO2 is monitored using seismic data and although the possibility of leakage cannot be ruled out entirely, it is safe for hundreds of years at least, says the company.

A major hurdle to implementing CCS more widely – most obviously to high emitting installations such as power stations or steel plants – is the high cost of removing the gas. According to McKinsey this part of the process accounts for at least two-thirds of the total cost of capture, transportation, and storage, largely because it is itself an energy intensive process.

The most widely used method involves passing flue gases though a liquid reagent that chemically binds the CO2, but which requires heating to release it for final disposal. “The technology has been known for about 40 or 50 years. The major downside is that it’s capital intensive. It could add £150 million pounds to the cost of a power station, and also result in losing around 17% of the energy output,” says Ian Phillips of CO2DeepStore.

But other techniques for carbon capture are being investigated, and wider implementation could bring significant economies of scale. This is partly because heavy emitting installations are often located close together, and so could share parts of the CCS infrastructure. For example, the Ruhr area accounts for around 10% of German territory, but 75% of German emissions from large stationary sources. With a Europe-wide network of 80 to 120 commercial-scale projects, the cost of CCS could be brought down to around 30 to 45 Euros per tonne by 2030, says McKinsey – the right ball-park for CCS to be a viable alternative to purchasing EU allowances. A global rollout of 500 or so installations could bring the cost down to 5 Euros per tonne, it says.

Too little, too late?

But we are still a very long way from this point. “Part of the problem is that it just doesn’t cost anything to emit CO2 at the moment,” says Ian Phillips. Even if enough EU organisations had to pay for their carbon emissions at prices that were reasonably stable and pegged at a level that would justify investment in CCS, there are unknowns surrounding the technology. “We need more demo projects – experience of putting the components together and finding out more about what the engineering problems are,” says Roland Clift.

The EU is making efforts to remedy this, but progress is slow. A Directive is being drafted that could mandate CCS for heavy emitters by around 2025, and fund more demo projects through the sale of at least 300 million EU carbon allowances. Until recently, there were just nine such demo projects in Europe - four in Norway, two each in Germany and the UK, and one in France. The UK Government aims to step up its support for CCS by funding a demonstration competition, which aims to explore the feasibility of capturing 90% of the CO2 emitted by a commercial coal-fired station with 300 to 400MW generating capacity.

Overall, there appears to be a lack of “joined up thinking” in the government’s approach, according to some observers. For example, the go-ahead has been given to a new generation of coal-fired stations such as Kingsnorth, but without any binding commitment on if or how they will be CCS-compatible. “It was criminal to let Kingsnorth go ahead like this,” says Roland Clift.

And the Government may have done too little too late to open up the global commercial opportunities to the UK, says Clift. “The Government has tended to give verbal support to CCS, but that’s about it. If you want to export low carbon technologies to the developing world – and we do – CCS is something that we in the UK could take the lead on, and countries like India and China would almost certainly be very interested. The worry is that we’ve missed the boat,” he says.

Key questions:

·Could our low carbon strategy include more than purchase of allowances?

·What are our competitors overseas doing to mitigate their emissions?

·Is there any potential to export our low carbon expertise?