I came across an article on the BBC this week that got me thinking.
It was covering the companies making record profits from the current conflict in the Middle East, oil giants, banks, defence firms. The usual suspects when energy markets go haywire.
But one line near the bottom of the piece stopped me in my tracks. Octopus Energy had told the BBC that the war had caused a "huge jolt" in solar panel and heat pump sales, with solar enquiries up 50% since the end of February. And my first reaction, honestly, was not
"great news for renewables."
It was something closer to:
why does it take this?
I don't say that to preach.
I'm not in the business of lecturing anyone about net zero or carbon targets.
But I do spend a lot of time talking to business owners about energy efficiency projects, and what I find is that the vast majority of them already know the numbers stack up. They have had the conversations with installers. They have seen the projected savings.
The case for solar, or heat pumps, or LED retrofits, or battery storage, it does not suddenly become compelling because oil prices spike. It was already compelling.
The economics of energy efficiency have been solid for years. A well-structured solar installation on a commercial roof can generate meaningful savings from the first month.
The technology is mature, the installers are experienced, and the return on investment is measurable in a way that very few other capital projects can match. None of that changed when the Strait of Hormuz closed.
What the crisis does, I suppose, is cut through the noise. It makes the conversation feel urgent in a way that a spreadsheet of projected savings never quite manages.
When your energy bill doubles in a quarter, suddenly the installer's quote that sat in your inbox for three months gets a second look. That is human nature, and I understand it completely. But here's what I find genuinely encouraging about the current moment. The businesses reaching out are not doing so in a panic.
They're doing so with a real sense of purpose, a feeling that now is the time to take control of something they have been meaning to address for a while. The crisis has not created the desire; it has just given people permission to act on it.
That shift in mindset matters, because the biggest barrier to getting these projects off the ground has rarely been the technology or even the cost. It has been the friction of financing them.
A commercial solar project or a multi-technology energy upgrade is not a straightforward proposition for a traditional lender. The numbers that make it compelling, the projected savings, the payback period, the change in your energy exposure,are not the numbers that appear on a standard loan application.
That is probably why we are seeing so many enquiries at the moment. Not just because energy prices are high, but because business owners are finally ready to have a different kind of conversation about how to fund these projects, one that starts with the technology and the savings, rather than just the balance sheet.
If you are in that position, quote in hand, project ready to go, just not sure how to structure the funding, that is exactly the kind of conversation I enjoy having.
Ref: From oil giants to banks: The companies making billions from the Iran war"https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ce8pyyz5e0ro