Looking back at December 2008, we barely mentioned shale gas, which for various reasons, but mostly to do with its disruptive potential, has been an obsession here lately.
But we started out with the basic rule that saving energy is saving money and both are far easier than most experts would have business buyers believe. Why? The simple answer is that making a problem appear complex is the first and hardest part of the sale. Convince someone energy is a problem and getting them to sign up to an expensive solution is the easy part.
From day one we've been techno optimists, in that we think there are solutions of various horizon lengths that can transform energy use and costs. A long term would be something like solar, which is predicted as being able to generate electricity at grid parity even at higher latitudes sooner than many think.
On a shorter horizon but still techno optmists, we've always been fans of OLED lighting. So when one of the top three lighting manufacturers Osram says the future has already started, we have to look. But Osram are only one. GE was built on incandescent lighting, and has embraced LED and OLED as the new world order. Phillips the other world lighting powerhouse agrees, and coming up quick are Samsung and LG.
Printable OLEDs promise to tick all the boxes: Cheap, low power and low carbon. But they also add another not usually of importance to business users, but vital to consumers: They promise to be transformative works of art.
What attracted us was the idea that illumination is up to one third of business energy use. Street lighting is a staggering one quarter of all electric use in urban areas and domestic lighting is somewhere in between. And we haven't even considered the savings that OLED will offer for display: advertising and screen displays of what are now called TVs, computers and mobile phones.
To us, OLEDs promise a dual revolution in that electricity displaced from illumination means electricity generation itself will be revolutionised. At first this seemed that it was a case where simply we could lose 15 to 20% of generation capacity: No need to worry about lights out Britain when we will use so much less. No need to worry about peak supply when demand disappears.
But the amount of power that OLEDs need promises to be so small that this opens up the possibility of self generated illumination via solar or paper thin batteries
Combine solar advances with OLED. Throw in heat pumps and smart meter based efficiency. Generate the remaining electricity via abundant natural gas. The next decade promises to be transformative, not terrifying. Don't buy catastrophe stories. And don't let people sell them to you.