When Your Energy Provider Tells You to Jump

Scottish and Southern Energy have issued rather bracing guidance to its customers that they should eat porridge, purchase merino wool socks, cuddle pets, and do star jumps to stay warm while keeping bills down in the face of soaring energy costs.

This has the merit at least of being a more rational strategy than trying to supply the colossal power requirements of the global industrial manufacturing system with intermittent sunbeams and summer breezes, using short-lived gadgets that require for their manufacture … a hydrocarbon-powered, global industrial manufacturing system.

I’m happy to report that my alternative strategy of building a Passivhaus that, without a heating system, maintains 19 degC in the depths of a Scottish winter, cutting annual energy bill by 80%, is proving to be rather more effective than either of those alternatives.

It’s 15 years since the global petroleum system hit the physical limit of economic extraction, pushing the global financial system off a cliff. I built my house on the basis of that realisation, acquired through my experience as a petroleum engineer and energy economist.

The world has been running on hallucinated debt since then, mistaking “falling” for “flying”, and the only innovation has been the invention of increasingly elaborate ways of presenting “increasing debt” as “adding value”. But the inexorable rise in price of food, energy and travel is forcing millions of people to realise that their “pensions” - born of a time when stock markets, investing in real things expanding with an expanding net energy supply, rose 7% every year - are now part of that hallucination. The rough beast of star jumps and hugging the dog slouches towards us, its hour come round at last.

Passive Houses have this interesting property: the reduction in rising energy cost for the rest of my life can be compared to the pension annuity I would have to purchase at retirement to fund that energy. The higher energy costs rise, the larger my “pension” gets. The entire value of that pension instrument was realised the moment the house achieved airtightness. The virtual annuity alone is now a large 6 figure sum, rising fast. Are your investments in “renewable” energy firms - performing as well? Happy New Year, everyone.