ADE Energy Efficiency Conference 8th October: Leading the Green Recovery

The ADE’s James Griffiths opened the event and set the scene, reminiscing about the conference last year, which was held in a member’s office with everyone seated very closely together!Of course so much has happened over the course of the last 12 months, coronavirus has dominated the news and our lives and along with it   - in energy circles, at least! - has been the ‘Green Recovery’ and the role which energy efficiency can play; creating jobs, helping to reskill workers, enabling homeowners to make their homes warmer and healthier, even more necessary in our current home-working world, and of course helping us reduce our carbon emissions.  This was the theme of this year’s conference: ‘Leading the Green Recovery.’The conference opened with an excellent presentation from Maxine Jordan from the International Energy Agency (IEA), aptly setting the scene on the role of energy efficiency in a Green Recovery, supported with some key stats from the IEA’s recent work.Following this the first session: From Stimulus to Sustained Action included presentations from: Professor Jim Watson (UCL) who gave a fascinating overview of the recent findings of the Climate Assembly report. Liz Kitchen (BEIS) who presented the government’s vision for heat and buildings. Nicholas Doyle (Adecoe) with an overview of the opportunities available in social housingThis session was completed with a presentation from Sue Kearns from Scottish Government,  who also gave some thoughtful reflections on the preceding presentations and chaired a panel discussion.In our second session: Business and the public sector ahead of COP26, we heard from: Simon Burgess (Siemens) who outlined Siemens’ partnership approach to public sector decarbonisation. Dominic Humphrey (BEIS) on the potential of in-use energy performance ratings in commercial buildings. Simon Green (VRM Tech) on how we can scale action in SMEs.The second session was drawn to a close after a lively panel discussion and questions from the audience, chaired by Dr Joanne Wade from the ADE.We would like to thank all our speakers once again for their excellent contributions.We will shortly be putting up a recording of the conference and will add it to this page.