SEE Action Fact Sheet
Provides an overview of the State and Local Energy Efficiency Action Network (SEE Action).
SEE Action↗
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Resources for State Energy Officials
Provides a summary of State and Local Energy Efficiency Action Network (SEE Action) information resources available to state energy officials, organized by topic.
SEE Action↗
Industrial Energy Efficiency and Combined Heat and Power Fact Sheet
Provides an overview of the State and Local Energy Efficiency Action Network's (SEE Action) Industrial Energy Efficiency and Combined Heat and Power Working Group.
CHP↗
Resources for Local Policymakers
Provides a summary of State and Local Energy Efficiency Action Network (SEE Action) information resources available to local policymakers, organized by topic.
local policymakers↗
Resources for Utility Regulators
Provides a summary of State and Local Energy Efficiency Action Network (SEE Action) information resources available to utility regulators, organized by topic.
regulators↗
2020 Leadership Agenda for Existing Commercial and Multifamily Buildings
Leadership by state and local governments is critical to unlock national energy efficiency opportunities and deliver the benefits of efficiency to all Americans. But related to building energy efficiency, what will it mean to be a public sector leader over the next several years? What are the energy efficiency solutions that cities, counties, and states are implementing today that will make their communities more affordable, livable, healthy, and economically competitive? The SEE Action Network 2020 Leadership Agenda for Existing Commercial and Multifamily Buildings establishes a benchmark for state and local government leadership on improving the energy efficiency of buildings and seeks two-way collaboration among state, local, and federal officials. It defines a suite of innovative, yet practical policies and programs for policymakers to consider implementing by 2020, focusing on six important areas.
99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS↗
Credit Enhancement Overview Guide
Provides considerations for state and local policymakers and energy efficiency program administrators designing and implementing successful credit enhancement strategies for residential and commercial buildings.
credit enhancements, loan loss reserve funds, loan↗
SEE Action Guide for States: Energy Efficiency as a Least-Cost Strategy to Reduce Greenhouse Gases and Air Pollution and Meet Energy Needs in the Power Sector
This guide is designed to provide information to state decision makers and staff on options to advance energy efficiency through strategies designed or implemented at the state and local levels of government and in the private sector.1 The information in this guide is intended to be useful to a wide variety of partners and stakeholders involved in energy-related discussions and decision-making at state and local levels. These energy efficiency options, or “pathways” as they are identified in this guide, can assist states in using energy efficiency to meet air pollution reduction and other policy objectives such as energy affordability and reliability. A pathway is a set of interdependent actions that results in measurable energy savings streams and associated avoided air emissions and other benefits over a period of time. These activities can include state, local, or private sector regulations, policies, programs and other activities. For each of five broad pathways that offer sizable cost-effective energy savings, the guide addresses likely questions policy makers and regulators face when screening for the best opportunities to advance energy efficiency in their state.
32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗
A Policymaker's Guide to Scaling Home Energy Upgrades
There has never been a better time to launch initiatives to promote residential energy efficiency savings. Over the past several decades, residential retrofit programs have demonstrated that energy efficiency measures contribute to achieving multiple benefits, including but not limited to reductions in home energy consumption, stabilization improvements for the grid by shaving peak loads, saving consumers millions on utility bills, and significantly reducing carbon emissions. Although a number of barriers to widespread uptake of home energy upgrades persist, the lessons learned as a result of the 2009 stimulus funding1 have resulted in a set of policy approaches that create new strategies for taking residential energy efficiency to scale.2 The identification of these approaches is well timed; energy efficiency is often the least expensive and most cost effective way to comply with a variety of federal, state and local policies. This Guide is designed to help state and local policymakers to take full advantage of new policy developments by providing them with a comprehensive set of tools to support launching or accelerating residential energy efficiency programs. It is written primarily for state and local policymakers, including state and local executives, legislators, public utility commissioners, and the staff who advise them.
29 ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY↗
Energy Efficiency Collaboratives
Collaboratives for energy efficiency have a long and successful history and are currently used, in some form, in more than half of the states. Historically, many state utility commissions have used some form of collaborative group process to resolve complex issues that emerge during a rate proceeding. Rather than debate the issues through the formality of a commission proceeding, disagreeing parties are sent to discuss issues in a less-formal setting and bring back resolutions to the commission. Energy efficiency collaboratives take this concept and apply it specifically to energy efficiency programs—often in anticipation of future issues as opposed to reacting to a present disagreement. Energy efficiency collaboratives can operate long term and can address the full suite of issues associated with designing, implementing, and improving energy efficiency programs. Collaboratives can be useful to gather stakeholder input on changing program budgets and program changes in response to performance or market shifts, as well as to provide continuity while regulators come and go, identify additional energy efficiency opportunities and innovations, assess the role of energy efficiency in new regulatory contexts, and draw on lessons learned and best practices from a diverse group. Details about specific collaboratives in the United States are in the appendix to this guide. Collectively, they demonstrate the value of collaborative stakeholder processes in producing successful energy efficiency programs.
32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗
Insights from Smart Meters: Ramp-Up, Dependability, and Short-Term Persistence of Savings from Home Energy Reports
Smart meters, smart thermostats, and other new technologies provide previously unavailable high-frequency and location-specific energy usage data. Many utilities are now able to capture real-time, customer-specific hourly interval usage data for a large proportion of their residential and small commercial customers. These vast, constantly growing streams of rich data (or big data) have the potential to provide novel insights into key policy questions about how people make energy decisions.
32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗
Accessing Secondary Markets as a Capital Source for Energy Efficiency Finance Programs: Program Design Considerations for Policymakers and Administrators
Estimates of the total opportunity for investment in cost-effective energy efficiency in the United States are typically in the range of several hundred billion dollars (Choi Granade, et al., 2009 and Fulton & Brandenburg, 2012).1,2 To access this potential, many state policymakers and utility regulators have established aggressive energy efficiency savings targets. Current levels of taxpayer and utility bill-payer funding for energy efficiency is only a small fraction of the total investment needed to meet these targets (SEE Action Financing Solutions Working Group, 2013). Given this challenge, some energy efficiency program administrators are working to access private capital sources with the aim of amplifying the funds available for investment. In this context, efficient access to secondary market capital has been advanced as one important enabler of the energy efficiency industry “at scale.”3 The question of what role secondary markets can play in bringing energy efficiency to scale is largely untested despite extensive attention from media, technical publications, advocates, and others. Only a handful of transactions of energy efficiency loan products have been executed to date, and it is too soon to draw robust conclusions from these deals. At the same time, energy efficiency program administrators and policymakers face very real decisions regarding whether and how to access secondary markets as part of their energy efficiency deployment strategy.
29 ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY↗
Insights from Smart Meters: Identifying Specific Actions, Behaviors, and Characteristics That Drive Savings in Behavior-Based Programs
In this report, we use smart meter data to analyze specific actions, behaviors, and characteristics that drive energy savings in a BB program. Specifically, we examine a Home Energy Report (HER) program. These programs typically obtain 1% to 3% annual savings, and recent studies have shown hourly savings of between 0.5% and 3%.1 But what is driving these savings? What types of households tend to be “high-savers,” and what behaviors are they adopting? There are several possibilities: one-time behaviors (e.g., changing thermostat settings), reoccurring habitual behaviors (e.g., turning off lights), and equipment purchase behaviors (e.g., energy efficient appliances); these may vary across households, regions, and over time.
29 ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY↗
Making It Count: Understanding the Value of Energy Efficiency Financing Programs Funded by Utility Customers
Utility customer-supported financing programs are receiving increased attention as a strategy for achieving energy saving goals. Rationales for using utility customer funds to support financing initiatives
29 ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY↗
Sustained Energy Savings Achieved through Successful Industrial Customer Interaction with Ratepayer Programs: Case Studies
Many states have implemented ratepayer-funded programs to acquire energy efficiency as a predictable and reliable resource for meeting existing and future energy demand. These programs have become a fixture in many U.S. electricity and natural gas markets as they help postpone or eliminate the need for expensive generation and transmission investments. Industrial energy efficiency (IEE) is an energy efficiency resource that is not only a low cost option for many of these efficiency programs, but offers productivity and competitive benefits to manufacturers as it reduces their energy costs. However, some industrial customers are less enthusiastic about participating in these programs. IEE ratepayer programs suffer low participation by industries across many states today despite a continual increase in energy efficiency program spending across all types of customers, and significant energy efficiency funds can often go unused for industrial customers. This paper provides four detailed case studies of companies that benefited from participation in their utility’s energy efficiency program offerings and highlights the business value brought to them by participation in these programs. The paper is designed both for rate-payer efficiency program administrators interested in improving the attractiveness and effectiveness of industrial efficiency programs for their industrial customers and for industrial customers interested in maximizing the value of participating in efficiency programs.
29 ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY↗
Energy Efficiency Finance Programs: Use Case Analysis to Define Data Needs and Guidelines
There are over 200 energy efficiency loan programs—across 49 U.S. states—administered by utilities, state/local government agencies, or private lenders.1 This distributed model has led to significant variation in program design and implementation practices including how data is collected and used. The challenge of consolidating and aggregating data across independently administered programs has been illustrated by a recent pilot of an open source database for energy efficiency financing program data. This project was led by the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), the Investor Confidence Project, the Clean Energy Finance Center (CEFC), and the University of Chicago. This partnership discussed data collection practices with a number of existing energy efficiency loan programs and identified four programs that were suitable and willing to participate in the pilot database (Diamond 2014).2 The partnership collected information related to ~12,000 loans with an aggregate value of ~$100M across the four programs. Of the 95 data fields collected across the four programs, 30 fields were common between two or more programs and only seven data fields were common across all programs. The results of that pilot study illustrate the inconsistencies in current data definition and collection practices among energy efficiency finance programs and may contribute to certain barriers.
29 ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY↗
Insights from Smart Meters: The Potential for Peak-Hour Savings from Behavior-Based Programs
The rollout of smart meters in the last several years has opened up new forms of previously unavailable energy data. Many utilities are now able in real-time to capture granular, household-level interval usage data at very high-frequency levels for a large proportion of their residential and small commercial customer population. This can be linked to other time and location-specific information, providing vast, constantly growing streams of rich data (sometimes referred to by the recently popular buzz word, “big data”). Within the energy industry there is increasing interest in tapping into the opportunities that these data can provide.
29 ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY↗
ENERGY STAR® Retail Products Platform (RPP): Conditions and Considerations in Evaluating Market Transformation Programs and Evaluation Guidance for RPP
The purpose of this guide is to provide a resource for state utility regulators, utilities, the evaluation community and regulatory stakeholders on methods to measure energy savings from the ENERGY STAR Retail Products Platform (link is external). The guidelines outlined in this document were developed by evaluation experts.
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