Stew Horne – Energy Saving Trust
Stew is Head of Policy at Energy Saving Trust. Energy Saving Trust is a trusted, independent voice, with over 25 years’ experience of providing advice and support around home energy efficiency, low carbon transport and renewable energy generation.
Stew has worked in energy policy for over a decade. He previously led Citizens Advice’s energy infrastructure work, winning Charity Times “Campaigning Team of the Year” in 2018, and earlier delivered consumer policy at the energy regulator Ofgem. Before that he worked in central government across a wide range of consumer policy areas such as digital television switchover and nutritional labelling on food.
Lecture Theatre My Net Zero Journey
From digital switchover to decarbonisation
Lowering energy demand is absolutely crucial to tackling the climate crisis. Being more energy efficient means we need to generate less energy in the first place, build less infrastructure and will make the 2050 targets more achievable. I studied green politics as part of my degree and have been looking for roles to help deliver the changes we need since then.
In my role as Head of Policy at Energy Saving Trust my team aims to provide the arguments and evidence to UK policy makers to delivery policy and delivery that will accelerate the retrofit of homes, take up of renewables and decarbonised heat and switching to sustainable transport.
My career didn’t start here. I began working on policy around digital television switchover, and then around food safety and food labelling before moving into energy. The thread that runs through my career is consumer policy and understanding behaviour change. These are such key parts of addressing climate change – and a key challenge in my role is making sure policy makers think about these changes when they design legislation, policy and delivery schemes.