UK E-Day: A good use of energy?

Matt Prescott, BBC Green Room 7 Apr 08;

Recently the UK saw its first Energy Saving Day, or E-Day - an attempt to involve people in reducing the nation's energy use and carbon emissions. In the end, no savings resulted; and in the Green Room this week, its architect Matt Prescott looks back and asks "was it worth the effort?"

E-Day was designed to raise awareness that saving energy offers a quick, simple way of tackling the massive and urgent threat posed by climate change, and makes sense as a way of saving money and improving peoples' comfort in summer and winter.

I hoped to focus attention on how almost everyone can painlessly take greater personal responsibility for reducing their own demand for energy, and so cutting carbon emissions.

I had calculated that if every one of the 22 million households in the UK turned off just one 100 watt light bulb, on the same day, four 500 megawatt coal-fired power stations could be turned off.

I therefore wanted to see whether this information could be brought to life in a way that involved and interested everyone, and whether asking everyone to switch off at least one electrical item for a day could produce a noticeable impact on the country's energy use and carbon emissions.

No-one likes being repeatedly beaten over the head with messages asking them to "make sacrifices for the planet".

So I decided E-Day should be fun - and was able to set it up initially as a comedy-led BBC television programme likely to feature the talents of people like Graham Norton.

After 18 months of work, BBC TV cancelled Planet Relief just as we were getting ready to go into production.

This was apparently because a couple of other environmental projects had delivered poor ratings and there had been a public debate about whether it was the BBC's job to "save the planet".

The cancellation had immediate implications for E-Day - the first being that it was likely to slide into oblivion - but also raised wider questions about the public's appetite for the climate issue.

Opinion polls show widespread concern about climate change, and a significant majority in favour of taking action - so why weren't people watching? Or were broadcasters being too timid?

Anyway - I decided to see whether I could make E-Day work as an independent venture. The environment charities, religious groups, energy companies and scientists I had been working with decided to remain involved, and the National Grid agreed it would still monitor national electricity use - so it seemed viable.

However, I had very little money to make things happen. A couple of charities came through with no strings attached funding, and the damage to my bank account - while still the equivalent of a deposit on a house - looked manageable.

Still-bjorn?

Come the big day, thanks largely to some fantastically talented people giving their time for free, we had a superb website, a fresh and fun launch event at St Paul's Cathedral featuring the premiere of a bicycle-powered cinema, some lovely short films on YouTube and the agreement of some of the large energy companies to use E-Day to promote home insulation.

But the big disadvantage of working outside one of the big media or campaign groups is that you are dependent on others for publicity.

Without publicity, no-one would know that E-Day was happening, and so almost by definition it was bound to fail on both objectives - lowering energy use and spreading awareness.

In the end, this proved the project's Achilles heel.

The Sun covered our "Bjorn The Bear" video, the BBC News website carried a live data feed of electricity use, BBC News 24 filmed the launch, and 15 local radio stations interviewed me.

A Russian TV news channel, with an audience of 100 million, decided that E-Day was important enough to merit 10 minutes of prime time coverage, even during the Russian elections.

MTV phoned up and asked if they could be part of E-Day in the last few hours!

But it was not enough. As Kevin Costner might have said in Field of Dreams: "We built it; but they did not come".

I was deluged with emails saying, in a nutshell: "Great idea - wish I'd known about it".

It didn't help that the National Grid's prediction for "business as usual" electricity demand immediately ran into trouble.

The day was colder than expected, and this meant that more heating and lighting were being used than the Grid's experts had predicted; for a while, the graphs allowed you to conclude that E-Day had raised energy use - and maybe this dissuaded people from taking part.

Towards the end of E-Day, the Grid used actual weather data to update its predictions, and its final figures revealed that electricity use over the 24 hours of E-Day was 0.1% higher than would have been expected.

At first, I was hugely disappointed by this result.

But as the next morning dawned, and hundreds of encouraging emails started to pour in from children, businesses, councils and people overseas, I started to realise just how much had been achieved.

Insular, insulate

Now, a month or so on, I am able to step back a bit and ask: was it worth it?



First, the positives. Many energy companies, charities, academics and retailers set aside their day-to-day differences and found common cause; that has to bode well for the future.

Through E-Day, five major energy companies simplified the hoops that people have to jump through when they apply for help with home insulation; perhaps this is a model they can take forward now.

They are required to offer these services by law, so they might as well make it as easy as possible.

The together.com coalition of big companies pledged to reduce the carbon dioxide emissions of their customers by 1 million tonnes in time for the next E-Day.

Divide and fall

Will there be another E-Day, though?

Right now, I don't know. If there is, I hope that the next one will be bigger and better, and able to build on the ideas, lessons, support and interest generated this time around.

The novelty and ambition of E-Day appeared to create a rare set of conditions under which competitors felt they were missing out if they refused to join efforts to save energy and to come up with solutions to climate change.

However, the fact that E-Day couldn't guarantee high-profile coverage meant that many big and wealthy organisations decided they could say "yes" to contributing a low-cost idea and their logo, but "no" to spending any money on publicity.

There are of course other initiatives with similar aims, such as the recent Earth Hour.

All of them are worthwhile; what we must not do in the environmental community is create any sense of competition between them.

If different groups concentrate on promoting just their "own" ventures, none will achieve what they want. We must keep our common goal of reducing carbon emissions in mind.

Hopefully, next time around it will be possible for all the E-Day partners to promote it more whole-heartedly so that all of their customers and members know exactly when it is, what they are being asked to do and what solutions are on offer.

I also hope that a major media organisation or two will turn out to have a serious enough interest in saving energy that we can do something exciting and unique together in time for the next E-Day.

The Daily Mail's campaign to banish plastic bags appears to have borne fruit; the recent Budget gives supermarkets a year to put their houses in order, otherwise legislation will force them to.

To me, this shows that simple, focused campaigns with significant media coverage, designed to help the environment, can be effective and popular.

Comic Relief and Children in Need successfully campaign against poverty and child abuse; so I hope that backing sensible measures to save energy and urgently tackle climate change, to the level the science indicates to be necessary, will not frighten anyone in the British media for much longer.

Meanwhile, our leaders need to lead and our governments to govern, while customers and voters need to demand and support efforts to save energy and tackle climate change without delay.

In the end, bringing carbon emissions down as far as we need to will require not an E-Day but an E-lifetime; and we should grasp every chance we have to spread the word and start on the small steps that will make the big challenges we all face less daunting.

Dr Matt Prescott is an environmental consultant and director of banthebulb.org, an online campaign encouraging greater energy efficiency, and founding co-ordinator of E-Day

The Green Room is a series of opinion pieces on environmental topics running weekly on the BBC News website