I don’t want to alarm you, but I’m afraid ‘Energy’ has gone really quite mad.
Whether you recently plucked up the courage to take a peak at your energy bill, took a squint at your weekly big-shop receipt and vowed off food in general, or dared to flick onto ‘THE NEWS’ and discover more about the thoroughly miserable climate change situation, you already know that I’m right: Energy is BROKEN.
Globally, our problems with energy run deep: how we generate it, how it’s owned and operated, how it’s sold, and how we pay for it. How it’s transported, wasted, controlled, used, mis-used and sometimes thoroughly abused.
Here in the UK, we’re perhaps feeling the rise in energy bills more sharply than most. An island nation, self-severed from the EU at a time of great economic and political tom-foolery, our energy prices have suffered harder and longer than most.
Keeping the lights on, our homes heated and our petrol tanks full now costs most of us a small fortune each month. Many of us are regularly tearing our hair out while anxiously hovering over our smart meters yet all the while, the Big Picture looks bleak: the way we generate and use energy on a global scale is… well… it’s killing us and everything else on this otherwise beautiful planet that we would be wise to call home.
Without trying to sound too dramatic; we’re paying a fortune to burn down our own house.
It’s practically the very definition of unsustainability, and the data on climate change says that if we don’t alter our course soon we’re all likely to be either deceased, or worse still, skint.
On balance, I quite like life. I like the planet, the animals, trees and various other whatnots on it, and I want to keep it. Perhaps you do, too.
That’s why I created EnergySnap and why it will always have three goals:
EnergySnap helps you ‘Save Money, Save Energy, Save The Freaking Planet‘. Except two glasses of wine deep into the first draft of those goals, I didn’t say “freaking”.
Save money on your energy bill
First things first: your pockets. Feeling lighter than they used to? Mine too.
The huge rise in the cost of energy is most easily illustrated by looking at your recent energy bill, which is likely to have risen exponentially since before the Covid pandemic.
But with soaring inflation in the UK, the rise in energy has also hit most industries too, meaning that the Cost of Living Crisis is now in full swing and without getting too political, I doubt the cavalry is coming over the hill to pay for our fishfinger butties anytime soon.
It means that saving money on your utility bills has now become more important than ever in keeping household finances Strong and Stable (sorry, couldn’t help it).
EnergySnap will help by connecting you with some of the lowest energy tariffs in the UK. We can help guide you through conducting your own home energy review, assessing how much energy you are using, how much you’re paying for it, whether you can get a better energy deal, and ways to improve your home so it wastes less energy in the first place.
It all helps get you to a place where you a forking out less on energy bills than you used to, so you can either save it or spend it on something that means more to you. Like fishfinger butties. Probably.
Save Energy In Your Home
It’s one thing to reduce how much you pay for energy, and its another to reduce how much energy you actually have to pay for in the first place!
Here in the UK we’ve got millions of leaky old antique houses with low EPC scores, all spending more than they need to on their energy bills because they haven’t yet insulated their homes properly to modern standards. In fact, even some of the homes built in the last 30 or 40 years score much lower than you might think and can easily save money on their bills by properly insulating against the grey, moist (sorry) British climate.
And of course, deploying all this energy saving stuff helps with something bigger than our little homes and our (previously) empty pockets…
Save the Freaking Planet
I’ll be blunt.
The science of climate change is very real, and very strong.
There WILL be sources online that tell you otherwise, just as there are people in the world that will tell you that Elvis is alive, that aliens abduct cattle and that The Illuminati want you to pluck all your nasal hair out to make it easier for Ancient Egyptian space signals to travel up your nose and transfer their baked potato recipe to your subconscious.
Alright, I made that bit about nasal hair and baked potatoes up. But that’s the thing; a huge number of online sources fabricate a lot of nonsense, rubbish and pseudoscience to try to counter genuine, heavily researched, data-backed, published and peer-reviewed climate science.
Sure, every now and again somebody fires a genuine shot and makes scientists think twice about a certain aspect of climate science, or perhaps the effectiveness of a particular strategy for stopping it. That’s fine. Actually, it’s welcome and all part of the scientific process.
But in the grand scheme of things, nothing with any serious science behind it shakes the foundations of what we should all now know to be true:
The way we use energy (particularly fossil fuels) is a primary driving factor behind the globally devastating changes to our climate that we are now beginning to witness with alarming regularity.
The problem with EnergySnap
EnergySnap doesn’t pretend to have all the answers on how to save us from ourselves. Infact, swapping your energy tariff to a slightly cheaper one is unlikely to make much of a dent in the whole ‘Saving The World’ thing. It’s a huge issue with many moving parts and untold billions forcing them to keep moving at all costs.
But it is a start. It helps more households across the UK protect their bottom line. For every home that worries a little less about their energy bill, we hope that a little more focus goes into how that energy is generated and how much of it gets used.
I want us to engage our relationship with energy like never before. It’s so easy to take electricity and central heating for granted, as well as the natural world we live in.
But really, our wallets are at odds with our energy usage, which in turn is at odds with our fragile planet.
EnergySnap is about helping bring about the level of engagement, education and focus needed to save us from our own energy addiction.
So with that in mind, we better get to work.
Peace, love, a healthy planet and money in your pocket.
Love, Tom. x