Today Passivhaus is a voluntary standard for energy eficiency in construction, the objective being to reduce the environmental footprint of the building as much as possible. More recently developed in Germany and Scandinavia, passive design is not a supplementary detail to home building but a holistic approach seeking to integrate aesthetics, function and eficiency. It took of in the shadow of an insurgent green movement in 1980’s Germany, with engineers and architects taking inspiration from the eforts of North American designers as they themselves responded to the oil crisis a decade earlier.
While we will always need energy for light, gadgets, transport and industry, the same isn’t true for heating – certainly not on the scale we see today. Just because the transition to renewables will mean cleaner, more abundant energy than ever, that’s no excuse to ignore potential improvements in energy eficiency. That’s not to mention a big public health incentive. Across England and Wales every winter there are tens of thousands of ‘excess deaths’, primarily resulting from cold weather. Most of these could be avoided by implementing simple changes in homes and workplaces. Unlike renewable generation and storage what has stopped this from happening already isn’t technology, but political priorities.
Another area which demonstrates how innovation isn’t limited to energy generation and storage is light. At present, lighting accounts for one-fifth of UK electricity consumption. With LEDs, just as with improvements in solar cell, wind turbine and lithium-ion technology, we see the dividend of the experience curve in action once more, with the cost per lumen (the standard measure of visible light) falling 90 per cent between 2010 and 2016 alone. Indeed if all UK lighting was switched to LEDs, illumination would account for 3–4 per cent of overall electricity consumption compared to the 20 per cent it does at present.
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