You know there’s a real opportunity to cost-effectively reduce energy consumption when the CEO of a supermajor oil company (David O’Reilly of Chevron) argues in national advertisements that improvements in efficiency must become an increasingly significant factor in meeting future energy needs.

As additional evidence, consider the following recent letter to President Bush from Robert Lowe (Chairman of the Real Estate Roundtable, an industry association for real estate interests), arguing for greater federal push for additional energy efficiency measures.

Letter to President Bush from Real Estate Roundtable

It’s easy for all of us in the cleantech community to be seduced by improvements and breakthroughs in clean energy supplies — solar, wind, fuel cells, etc. However, it serves us well to remind ourselves occasionally that the greenest unit of energy is the unit of energy not consumed. While not letting up on developing renewable energy supplies, we should pay at least as much attention (and frankly probably more) to the demand-side of the equation.