Last November I was privileged to attend the CIPEC Energy 2011 conference in Toronto.  One of the keynote speakers was Tom Rand, Founder and Director of VCi Green Funds, Lead Cleantech Advisor at the MaRS Discovery District in Toronto.  I found Tom’s keynote speech to be  one of the most enlightened and practical summaries of the role of energy efficiency in helping address our global carbon challenge.

I would highly recommend reading this summary of Tom’s comments at the Energy 2011 conference.  Please see this link.

Here are a few of the key takeaways I got from Tom’s keynote speech:

• Think of clean energy as a tree with various fruits that are harder and easier to reach.
• Energy efficiency and peak demand reduction are the two lowest hanging, easy-to-reach fruit.  We shouldn’t need policy incentives to do this – CEO’s should be doing them now because they have ROI’s that are attractive.
• Need to unlock energy efficiency and demand management NOW if we ever expect to get to the more difficult systems such as shutting coal plants, etc.
• First step:  Efficiency – more GDP, less energy
• Second step:  Clean energy – more energy, less carbon
• BUT – we need to focus on the easy things first:  energy efficiency.

More from the Energy 2011 in future posts.

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