From Earth Techling

http://www.earthtechling.com/2010/07/home-star-clawing-way-through-senate/

Home Star Clawing Way Through Senate
by Nino Marchetti, July 16th, 2010

The Home Star bill, which would offer rebate incentives for greening your home projects such as energy efficiency upgrades, is slowly sloshing its way through Congress. After an early March unveiling by the White House, the bill passed the House of Representatives on May 6 via a 246-161 vote. It is now languishing in Senate committees, which is why a diverse group of nationally recognized companies, labor and environmental organizations and associations called the Home Star Coalition is now urging the Senate to get off its butt and get the legislation moving.

The Home Star Coalition, in an open letter [PDF] to President Obama and the Senate, is asking for the Home Star legislation to be included in the pending Small Business Jobs legislation being considered. This bill may end up moving faster through the Senate if everyone can be made happy enough, as indicated by a recent New York Times article about its hasty introduction after passing the House. It is believed by the Coalition that Home Star will have huge benefits for everyone, including job creation for small businesses, savings for homeowners and, of course, better energy efficiency for homes.

Home Star is described by the Coalition representing 2,000 members, for those unfamiliar with it, as “a market-driven, low-bureaucracy program that would create jobs fast by scaling the existing home energy efficiency improvement industry. Home Star would use rebates and tax incentives to spur more Americans to start making their homes more energy efficient. It would establish a streamlined rebate program to encourage immediate investment in energy-efficient appliances, building mechanical systems and insulation, and whole-home energy efficiency retrofits.” It is believed that if it passes and is signed into law, Home Star could create 168,000 new jobs in construction and related industries over the next two years.

“Home Star is the right investment for the country at the right time. That time is now,” said Tracy Price, CEO of The Linc Group, in a statement. “Energy efficiency is not a partisan issue, as it helps move us toward greater energy independence and enhances our national security. This program is targeted at the largest marketplace in the country, existing homes, and will create jobs in a new industry that will thrive for decades.”

http://www.earthtechling.com/2010/07/home-star-clawing-way-through-senate/

Posts from Efficiency First Blog for 07/12/2010.

Dear Efficiency First Members,

HOME STAR bills have been introduced in the House and the Senate, and the bill has passed the House Energy and Commerce Committee. It’s up to all of us to bring the bill HOME.

This May 19 and 20, Efficiency First members and others will gather in Washington, DC to push HOME STAR through Congress– and we need you with us.

Will you be there?

Click here to sign up for Efficiency First’s DC advocacy days (May 19-20).

We’ll be set up in teams, meeting with members of Congress and their staffs, talking about the huge potential for job creation under HOME STAR legislation.

In the past, we’ve had 40 or more Efficiency First members come to DC. This time, we need to double that number — or more. It’s an opportunity to meet Efficiency First leaders and help make history.

We can pass HOME STAR, but we need you there, in person.

Register today for the May 19 and 20 DC advocacy days by clicking here.

We’ll see you in DC!

Jared Asch
National Director
Efficiency First

As the Washington Senate considers SB 6656 on financing energy efficiency upgrades and energy conservation programs, Sightline Institute has detailed how such a program can create in-state jobs and reduce energy bills for families and businesses.

Specifically, Sightline recommends:

Family-friendly retrofits: Private sector-financing for energy efficiency investments are hard to get and potential savings are often unclear to homeowners. Revolving loan funds from local governments are a smart way to reuse the initial pool of federal stimulus.

Performance contracting: Not all energy retrofits are created equal; it’s important to choose the right projects. Auditing to determine the greatest opportunities for savings ensures we make the most of our investments.

On-bill financing: Letting families pay back their energy retrofit loans on their tax or utility bills makes energy efficiency easy and convenient.

The bottom line: Energy efficiencies mean big changes and big savings. Allowing local governments to make low interest loans for energy efficiencies–and letting people pay those loans back on their regular utility bills–is a big step toward a clean energy economy.

Read the full article here. I hope you’ll take a look.

Roger Valdez
Sightline Institute
206-447-1880 x 104
roger@sightline.org

From Sean Penrith, at Earth Advantage:

At this time Energy Trust of Oregon’s 2008 Energy Performance Score pilot is now complete and we invite you to read the final Findings & Recommendations report. The goal of the pilot was to develop a performance metric for existing homes that could be applicable to new construction homes and would reflect energy consumption and carbon emissions—an “MPG” for homes. In creating the metric, the pilot compared home energy modeling tools for their accuracy and ease of use in estimating home energy consumption.

Earth Advantage conducted the pilot for Energy Trust of Oregon, performing the home audits, data analysis, and the writing of the report. Conservation Services Group (CSG), the Home Energy Solutions – Existing Homes program implementation contractor, managed the pilot with Energy Trust of Oregon.

Due to the size of the files, the report and supporting documents are available at http://energytrust.org/eps/eps_ex.html.  

Please feel free to circulate this link and inform others of the release of this report. We feel the report’s discussion of home energy performance metrics is pertinent to many ongoing discussions on this topic.

Kindly yours,

The Center for American Progress has released this groundbreaking report, which details the barriers that need to be addressed to unleash the energy efficiency retrofits on a large scale.

http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2009/08/rebuilding_america.html

Download this report (pdf)

Download the executive summary (pdf) 

By Bracken Hendricks, Benjamin Goldstein, Reid Detchon, Kurt Shickman | August 10, 2009

Investments in building efficiency retrofits can simultaneously address the challenges of economic recovery, energy insecurity, and global warming by laying the foundation for sustained economic growth, driving demand in the construction and manufacturing sectors, and creating hundreds of thousands of good jobs across the country. Retrofitting our homes and businesses will also slash consumer energy expenditures, increase real estate values, and provide low-cost, near-term reductions in global warming pollution.

Today, buildings account for 70 percent of all U.S. electricity consumption and 40 percent of total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. Yet much of our housing and building stock is old, inefficient, and unnecessarily wasteful. While building codes and green building standards offer a tool for achieving deep improvements in energy use for new buildings, half of the buildings that will be standing in 30 years already dot our landscape. Any strategy to capture the benefits of energy efficiency in our “built environment” must include a program to retrofit our existing stock of residential, commercial and industrial structures.

Deep building retrofits can cut energy use by 20 to 40 percent with proven techniques and off-the-shelf technologies. Best of all, they can pay for themselves from the energy they save. “Rebuilding America,” a national program to cut energy waste in buildings, could reduce energy bills economy-wide by hundreds of billions of dollars annually. Energy efficiency retrofits also create good local construction jobs across the country at a time when well over a million construction workers sit idle in a sagging housing market. Demand for the manufactured products needed to retrofit buildings will also result in jobs by revitalizing the manufacturing sector and contributing to sustainable, long-term economic growth.

If building retrofits can be profitable and offer so many additional social and economic benefits, why has a large-scale market not yet materialized? The short answer is that the market for energy efficiency faces many information failures and real market barriers. Without specific public policies to encourage widespread private investments in energy efficiency, the great value of this market will be left unclaimed. The U.S. economy will be worse off for this failure to act. So too will our planet.

The failures evident in the lack of a thriving nationwide marketplace for energy efficiency products and services include:

• Poor availability of information for consumers about their energy consumption.
• Split incentives between building owners and tenants to invest in energy efficiency retrofits.
• Lack of capital or access to capital to support investments in energy efficiency.
• Limited tenancy or ownership structures that encourage short-term decision making
  and do not take into account the benefits of energy efficiency.
• Perceived costs of retrofits, and a lack of knowledge about available solutions.
• General risk aversion by consumers, especially when loans are tied to their personal
  credit instead of conveying with property.
• Disaggregated energy efficiency markets where many small decisions about purchasing, materials, operations, and maintenance are required in order to realize savings.
• High up-front borrowing costs for retrofits.
• The risk of creditor default in a real estate finance market that today is severely constrained.

Congress and the Obama administration have a historic opportunity to ensure that investments made in weatherization and energy efficiency as part of the recently passed American Recovery and Reinvestment Act evolve into a sustainable clean-energy retrofit program and a linchpin of the American economy for years to come. Together, government policymakers can forge a strategy that pursues clean energy as a tool for local and regional economic development in states and communities nationwide, as well for U.S. global economic competitiveness.

Retrofitting our houses and office buildings cannot be accomplished by public programs alone, however. Rebuilding our “built environment” will require changes in our real estate markets, new energy efficiency financing tools, more skilled labor to handle the construction and inspection work, and new private capital investments in the industries, infrastructure, and workforce required for energy efficiency. A coherent and coordinated national strategy for unleashing the market for energy efficiency is essential.

“Rebuilding America” focuses on the challenge of dramatically increasing investment in residential and commercial building energy efficiency, with a goal of retrofitting 50 million buildings—40 percent of our building stock—by 2020. Reaching that goal will require $500 billion in public and private investment but will directly and indirectly generate approximately 625,000 sustained full-time jobs and save consumers $32 billion to $64 billion a year in energy costs, or $300 to $1,200 a year for individual families.

Clean energy and climate legislation recently passed by the House of Representatives calls for reducing greenhouse gas emissions from 2005 levels by 17 percent by 2020, and by 83 percent by 2050. Rapidly improving the efficiency of our existing buildings is essential to meeting these goals, and the House bill and a companion Senate bill now under consideration could help in some very specific ways by supporting:

• Easier access for new customers to energy-retrofit programs and financing.
• Improved capacity of businesses to meet this new demand for retrofits.
• Training and certifying workers to handle this new demand and assure quality.
• Affordable financing for residential and small business retrofits.
• New institutions that will organize this market.

All of these measures are necessary building blocks for a strong national energy efficiency strategy, but this paper also looks at what more is needed. We’ve identified five key areas where focused national policy leadership is required immediately to launch a nationwide energy efficiency retrofit industry:
 

• Technical assistance and capacity building to create a national energy efficiency effort that builds and strengthens existing state, local, and private sector initiatives.
• Retrofit financing and cost recovery mechanisms to facilitate investment and capture the value of energy efficiency.
• Retrofit performance standards and quality assurance to improve consumer confidence and facilitate measurement and verification of energy savings, in this now deeply fragmented market.
• Smart codes and regulations to shift incentives toward efficiency and provide certainty for investors.
• Workforce development programs and job quality standards to supply the requisite high-quality labor force.

This architecture must be created through a comprehensive national policy approach consisting of a strategic combination of incentives and standards, both of which are critical to overcoming the numerous obstacles that have thus far discouraged consumers and businesses from taking action on energy efficiency. To create the market conditions needed to stand up an industry large enough to perform deep retrofits of 50 million buildings, Congress and the Obama administration should take two key actions:

1. Mobilize major institutions that have strong customer relationships with building owners to market energy efficiency to every building owner in America, provide improved tools for financing and repayment through existing billing mechanisms, and provide a trusted point of access for energy efficiency services that are certified and guaranteed. These institutions include:

• Utilities and other suppliers of electricity and gas.
• Banks and insurance companies that provide mortgages, insurance, and other financing.
• Local governments to whom building owners pay property taxes for public services.

2. Encourage the growth of a high-performance, high-standards retrofit industry by taking early steps to ensure performance standards and verifiable energy savings, and engaging market participants at every level, including:

• Consumers: Enhancing confidence with standards for auditing, performance measurement and verification, and better labeling of energy efficient buildings.
• Workers: Building strong labor markets through career training, job quality standards, and community-based pre-apprenticeship programs.
• Industry: Empowering building owners and contractors to act by providing better information to markets through and standards, incentives, and data.

Without a strong public policy framework, the private sector acting alone will not invest to maximize the clear private and public benefits of encouraging comprehensive energy efficiency, and the harm to the global climate will continue unabated. Over time, however, the public-sector role in jump starting these new energy efficiency markets can be reduced as the private sector develops improved business and finance models and once a price is established on global warming pollution. That is the path outlined in this paper.

Download this report (pdf)

Download the executive summary (pdf)

Article source:
http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2009/08/rebuilding_america.html

Puget Sound Energy Files Updated Energy Strategy with State Regulators

Integrated Resource Plan stays focused on energy efficiency, wind, natural gas

BELLEVUE, Wash., July 30, 2009 – Heightened energy efficiency, the development of more renewable power and additional natural gas-fired power generation are the linchpins of Puget Sound Energy’s newly updated strategy for meeting customers’ growing energy needs.

The utility’s 2009 Integrated Resource Plan (IRP), filed today with the Washington Utilities and Transportation Commission, guides the company’s efforts for acquiring new energy resources in the most cost-effective and environmentally responsible manner over the next 20 years. PSE revises the plan every two years with an updated forecast of customer energy requirements and exhaustive analyses of the economic, environmental and technological issues involved in securing new energy supplies.

Despite the current economic slump, PSE’s updated resource plan continues to forecast long-term growth in the utility’s 11-county service area. Approximately 1 million more Puget Sound residents will be relying on PSE service 20 years from now, the IRP predicts. Regional growth, together with the potential retirement of aging power plants and expiration of large purchased-power contracts, is driving PSE’s need to secure about 5,000 megawatts (MW) of additional power capacity over the next two decades, according to the IRP.

“Our challenge is not only to meet our customers’ growing energy needs in an economically prudent way, but in a way that protects our planet as well,” said Kimberly Harris, executive vice president and chief resource officer for PSE. “Our resource plan takes the right approach with more energy efficiency and renewable resources, augmented by more clean-burning natural gas generation.”

PSE’s already ambitious energy-efficiency programs should be expanded even further, the 2009 IRP says, to cost-effectively “generate” even more new energy supplies. In 2008, the utility’s energy-efficiency programs helped customers save electricity equivalent to the power usage of 23,000 homes, and enough natural gas to serve the need of 4,000 homes. PSE customers are expected to save about $30 million annually over the life of the energy-efficiency steps taken in 2008.

The 2009 IRP calls for even greater energy efficiency. More than 530 average-MWs of additional power savings can be achieved over the next 20 years, according to the resource plan. Those savings, sufficient to meet the electricity requirements of 400,000 households, would forestall the need to build four average-sized natural gas-fired power plants. The plan also identifies 90 million therms of achievable natural-gas savings by PSE customers, enough to satisfy the total gas needs of 108,000 households.

The new energy-efficiency targets represent 22 percent and 30 percent increases, respectively, in the electricity and natural gas efficiency goals cited in PSE’s 2007 IRP.

Read more on PSE web site

http://newsroom.pse.com/article_display.cfm?article_id=291

Efficiency can help Northwest meet 85% of new electricity demand

by Ted Sickinger, The Oregonian

That’s a radical concept in an industry that typically meets growing demand by adding new production. Yet by all indications at the state and federal levels, energy efficiency’s day has arrived. In the draft of the 20-year energy policy blueprint that the advisory council is slated to vote on today, it’s at the top of the region’s shopping list.

“This plan is all about energy efficiency,” said Tom Eckman, the council’s manager of conservation resources. “In the next decade, that’s it. That’s where the action is.”

The power planning council was created by Congress in 1980 as a vehicle for Oregon, Washington, Idaho and Montana to coordinate energy policy and manage the Columbia River hydro system. Every five years, it delivers an updated power plan that details how utilities in the region can guarantee consumers adequate and reliable energy at the lowest economic and environmental cost.

BPA, which funds the council and serves 147 consumer owned utilities, is required to make resource decisions consistent with the plan. Investor-owned utilities such as Portland General Electric and PacifiCorp aren’t bound by it, but the plan is certainly a point of comparison as state regulators review their resource plans.

The council’s sixth power plan foresees regional utilities acquiring up to 1,400 megawatts of energy efficiency in the next five years — enough to power Seattle and then some — and 5,800 megawatts by 2030. Over 20 years, that’s equivalent to about one quarter of the energy used in the region today, or about 85 percent of the projected demand growth over that time.

About half of those energy savings are residential — from water heating, insulation, heat pumps and more efficient consumer electronics. Another 40 percent is commercial and industrial, from lighting, heating and more efficient operations.

The council estimates that conservation measures will cost less than half as much as building conventional power plants, and come carbon-free, a big plus as global warming legislation gathers momentum in Congress. The rest of the region’s new energy needs could be met primarily by wind farms, geothermal and some investments in gas-fired power plants by individual utilities such as Oregon’s largest, Portland General Electric.

Regardless of the utility, achieving the power council’s goals will require regional utilities to double or triple their investments in energy efficiency programs — investments on which they earn no return for shareholders, and which reduce demand for their core product. While that would raise rates in the short term, the council predicts energy bills will go down in the long run as customers use less energy.

Future benefits could also include job creation and economic stimulus.

“Even if you don’t care about climate change, on an energy basis alone, this is the right thing to do,” Eckman said.

The council’s plan doesn’t represent a complete consensus. Environmentalists say the plan is weakened because it doesn’t contemplate a coal-free future or specifically account for future carbon costs.

The plan is also an aggregation of all the region’s utilities, and doesn’t account for individual needs. PGE’s preferred resource plan, for example, includes two new gas plants, a major outlay on wind farms and significant investments in pollution controls to keep its largest coal plant operating.

PGE plans larger investments in energy efficiency, and could meet much of its demand growth that way. But the utility also is losing long-term hydropower contracts, and says it needs to replace those with resources that are available around the clock.

The council is scheduled to vote on the power plan today and the draft plan will be open to public comment for 60 days before a final plan is issued in December.

– Ted Sickinger; tedsickinger@news.oregonian.com

By Oskar Garcia, Associated Press

Tuesday, August 11, 2009

Hiring in the alternative energy industry will pick up in the next 12 months, though it will take some time before so-called green jobs will become a bigger part of the U.S. job market, Labor Secretary Hilda Solis said Monday.

“Once you start seeing more investments made in our economy recovering, as we stabilize and we get people back to work, then I think there’ll be more interest in expanding,” Solis said.

After a terrible start to the year there are signs of a rebound for alternative energy, in part because of a push from the Obama administration. Yet there is a split at the state and federal level over whether there are better ways to stimulate the job market.

The second National Clean Energy Summit in Las Vegas, where Solis spoke with the Associated Press, drew a high-profile list of alternative energy backers, including former President Bill Clinton, Energy Secretary Steven Chu and U.S. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

“The economic crisis, the security crisis and the climate crisis are all intertwined, and the common thread running through them is our absurd and dangerous overdependence on carbon-based fuels,” said Al Gore, the former vice president.

Venture capitalists increased investments in alternative energy by 73 percent over the past three months compared with the first three months of the year, according to a report issued late last month by Ernst & Young LLP. Investors are still shaken from the recession, however, and investment remains meager compared with last year at this time.

Wind, solar and other alternative energy companies have cut back on workers. Projects were canceled as credit markets froze and venture capital evaporated.

The Obama administration last week announced $2.4 billion in federal grants to develop next-generation electric vehicles and batteries.

Michigan, which has been devastated by job losses in the auto industry, would see companies within its borders get $1 billion in federal grants with the administration pushing green jobs as part of its economic cure.

Chu said federal officials have yet to award more money to other projects because they are reviewing proposals and want to make sure they pick the wisest possible investments.

“We’re moving,” he said.

There has been rapid growth in the industry, but employment in the green business still makes up only about half of 1 percent of all jobs.

This article appeared on page DC – 3 of the San Francisco Chronicle:
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/08/11/BUUQ196K5L.DTL