CONFERENCE AND EXHIBITION THE ISSUES
Making their views known... the audience contributes to the conversation
years – as an example of how finance can be used to help keep technology forward-looking and progressive. But the construction industry hasn’t had
ready finance available to it since the liquidity issues of 2008. Emerging markets, such as solar, are more
risky to fund – and, despite the technology for solar being around for 20 years, it is driven by external factors, such as the feed-in tariff, which exposed it to substantially more risk. That solar bubble has now burst, and businesses generally are finding it difficult to unlock funding, he said. ‘Finance should be the enabler for us as suppliers, installers and customers to get the technologies that we desire,’ added Riva. He admitted that it was much harder
to make the energy efficiency deal more compelling in the domestic sector, but added: ‘We should just use the damn stuff [energy] more efficiently.’
examined. Myles McCarthy, managing director of Carbon Trust Implementation Services, explained that, for any business to achieve a 20%, 30% or even 40% reduction in its energy use, they need to invest capital into their energy-efficiency retrofitting. However, the capital to create these reductions isn’t necessarily easy for a client to find – particularly in the current economic climate – which is why the Carbon Trust has teamed up with Siemens Financial Services to create an energy efficiency financing scheme. ‘Finance should be an enabler, allowing business to implement new technologies,’ explained Darren Riva, head of green finance at Siemens Financial Services. He highlighted what already happens in
the car industry – where motorists can use finance deals to replace their car every three
Measure, learn and then do... CIBSE president David Fisk’s advice to delegates
Simplicity is best
‘Keep it simple,’ CIBSE president David Fisk told delegates when he opened this year’s CIBSE Conference and Exhibition. Reinforcing the message in his presidential address earlier this year, he stressed the importance of ‘normal engineering’ and avoiding ‘green wash’. On the public debate about whether green is good for the economy, he said that, of the 10 best performing economies in the world, all were definitely greener than Britain’s. But, he cautioned, ‘bad green regulation is the worst of all worlds’.
20 CIBSE Journal November 2012
‘It’s not usually very green and it’s jolly expensive,’ he asserted.
At the heart of the green economy conundrum, energy management would allow a clever planet to ‘sort the rest out’, he insisted, adding that our power margins over the next few years are perilously narrow, and that it was about time engineers declared that we, as a nation, are using too much energy. He concluded by asking delegates to keep in mind a dictum used by one of his own college professors: ‘Measure, learn and then do.’
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Retrofitting The Green deal was a key theme at the conference, and it was standing-room only for the presentation by Tracey Vegro, a director of the Green Deal programme at the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC). Vegro quickly had delegates’ attention when
she said the Green Deal could create £10bn of investment over the next 10 years. She was keen to emphasise that the Green
Deal was open to all, and that it wouldn’t be a ‘stitch up’ by the big six energy companies. She revealed that the first two approved providers were a small plumbing firm and building services giant Carillion, which won the £600m Green Deal contract for Birmingham. Vegro said the Green Deal wasn’t a government programme but a framework
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