Using the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) free Home Energy Score, home inspectors can provide a miles-per-gallon type rating to their clients. By offering the rating and accompanying recommendations for efficiency improvements, home inspectors can help clients become eligible for mortgage incentives from FHA.

This webcast covers information about designing effective incentives to drive residential retrofit program participation.

This presentation provides an overview of ACEEE's nationwide study of utility provider incentives for the multifamily buildings sector, as well as a broad overview of other sources of funds for energy and water conservation. This session covered the latest news regarding state energy programs, local green banks, weatherization funds, tax credits, and more.

This summary from a Better Buildings Residential Network peer exchange call focused on working with multifamily and rental properties on energy efficiency programs. It features speakers from  American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, Community Housing Partners, and Northeast Energy Efficiency Partnerships.

This summary from a Better Buildings Residential Network peer exchange call focused on combining energy and health-related services.

This summary from a Better Buildings Residential Network peer exchange call focused on what residential energy efficient programs and strategies worked well in rural populations.

This summary from a Better Buildings Residential Network peer exchange call focused on types of incentives.

This peer exchange call summary focused on developing rebate/incentive programs to generate a demand for sustainable programs and products.

This summary from a Better Buildings Residential Network peer exchange call focused on challenges and strategies related to split incentives for tenants and landlords.

This summary from a Better Buildings Residential Network peer exchange call focused on shared funding arrangements with contractors.

This peer exchange call summary focused on strategies and challenges of working with rental property owners and tenants on multifamily upgrades.

This presentation describes strategies for outreach to energy contractors and auditors, including contractor incentives.

This presentation provides lessons to ensure effective incentive structures.

This presentation provides background information on energy efficiency financing barriers and opportunities. These barriers may include lack of confidence in energy savings, renter/owner split incentives, long paybacks, and high up-front costs. The presentation also includes five areas of opportunity for SEE Action Financing Solutions Working Group activities.

This presentation highlights research from U.S. Green Data showing that it is important to pique consumers' interest with incentives, but that their effectiveness can be maximized by making them simple, focusing on people "ready to purchase," and educating consumers about the value of energy efficiency.

The Better Buildings Residential Network Designing Incentives Toolkit can help residential energy efficiency programs design incentives that motivate potential customers to act by lowering the risk, decreasing the cost, or offering additional benefits with home energy upgrades. This toolkit provides easy access to various case studies, presentations, and tips related to incentive design.

The Database for Incentives and Joint Marketing Exchange (DIME) is an online, searchable tool to help manufacturers and retailers identify incentive and marketing opportunities for promoting ENERGY STAR certified products, and to enable all partners to coordinate with the appropriate contact from other partner organizations on promotional opportunities.

A pro forma is a tool of forecasting the impact that adjustments to a business model can have on future financials, using a set of assumptions and inputs. In the residential energy efficiency industry, programs can use pro forma tools to forecast the impact that marketing campaigns, incentive re-structuring, or other program changes will have on the program budget and results.  Example assumptions include the number of homeowner registrations that a set of marketing activities generate in a year, average assessment to upgrade conversion rate, and average incentive per project. By applying assumptions such as these, a pro forma tool can also help your program determine how effective various strategies are at achieving program goals and objectives. Program administrators can help contractors by supporting them with their own business pro forma. To help you get started, here are a few useful resources: the National Home Performance Council developed a presentation on their Integrated Pro Forma Project; for an example program pro forma, see the presentation by Virginia’s Local Energy Alliance Program (LEAP-VA); the National Home Performance Council also developed the Contractor Pro Forma Tool.

This database provides comprehensive information on state, federal, local, and utility incentives and policies that are in place to support renewable energy and energy efficiency.

The intent of the Handbook is to: Encourage energy efficiency design in new construction as well as in acquisition/rehab projects; Showcase the funding sources, programs, incentives, and assistance available to further lower investments in energy efficiency; Overcome owner-developers perception that achieving large energy savings is usually too expensive, time consuming or difficult; Demonstrate design concepts, processes, and practices that will help to minimize the costs of high performance buildings; Highlight the non-energy benefits associated with high performance buildings; Dispel the myth that cheaply built homes are affordable to operate in terms of utility costs; Emphasize that energy efficiency lowers utility bills, thereby enhancing home affordability; Stress that a home that just complies with Title 24 is the least efficient home you can legally build in California.

This handbook is a resource for building owners, building staff, co-op and condo board members, property managers, and all other building decision-makers to improve the energy efficiency of their buildings by understanding the most effective energy conservation measures. This resource introduces the basic principles of energy efficiency, incentive programs, available financing, relevant local laws, and technical training programs designed to reduce energy use and GHG emissions in New York CityÕs diverse multifamily building stock.

Utilities and regulators increasingly rely on behavior change programs as essential parts of their demand side management (DSM) portfolios. This report evaluates the effectiveness of currently available programs, focusing on programs that have been assessed for energy savings. This report focuses on behavior change programs that primarily rely on social-science-based strategies instead of traditional approaches such as incentives, rebates, pricing, or legal and policy strategies. The objective is to help program administrators choose effective behavior change programs for their specific purposes.

Utilities and regulators increasingly rely on behavior change programs as essential parts of their demand side management (DSM) portfolios. This report evaluates the effectiveness of currently available programs, focusing on programs that have been assessed for energy savings. This report focuses on behavior change programs that primarily rely on social-science-based strategies instead of traditional approaches such as incentives, rebates, pricing, or legal and policy strategies. The objective is to help program administrators choose effective behavior change programs for their specific purposes.

This report examines the history of pay-for-performance (P4P) energy efficiency approaches. As the report describes, there is a diverse spectrum of pay-for-performance programs but, at the most basic level, these programs track and reward energy savings as they occur, usually by examining data from a building's energy meters -- as opposed to the more common approach of estimating savings in advance of installation and offering upfront rebates or incentives in a lump-sum payment. The report finds that P4P has some important opportunities for increasing energy savings, but also key limitations that will need to be better understood through piloting and experimentation.

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. The Guide focuses on four categories of policies that have proven particularly effective in providing a framework within which residential energy efficiency programs can thrive: incentives and financing, making the value of energy efficiency visible in the real estate market, data access and standardization, and supporting utility system procurement of energy efficiency.

This report describes the effects of utility spending on efficiency programs, how those effects could constitute barriers to investment in energy efficiency, and how policy mechanisms can reduce these barriers.

This report summarizes the issues and approaches involved in motivating customers to reduce the total energy they consume through energy prices and rate design.

This report summarizes the approaches used by energy efficiency program administrators when assessing the range of financial and other incentives to be used in energy efficiency programs.

The New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) developed this manual for use by contractors participating in their New York Home Performance with ENERGY STAR (HPwES) program. The manual is intended to help contractors understand and navigate the HPwES program. It provides important information about HPwES program rules, opportunities, incentives, and forms. The manual is an example of a comprehensive contractor handbook in which programs will find many useful examples of forms, procedures, and other resources.

This report is the first comparative analysis of utility-run behavior programs. It lays the groundwork for further program development by developing a classification scheme, or taxonomy, that sorts programs into discrete categories. This study counted 281 such programs, many with multiple iterations, offered by 114 energy providers and third parties between 2008 and 2013. After sorting programs by distinguishing features such as delivery channel and incentive type, the study arrived at 20 major program categories grouped in three large families: Cognition Programs, Calculus Programs, and Social Interaction Programs.

This report provides comprehensive information on state, federal, local, and utility incentives and policies that are in place to support renewable energy and energy efficiency.

This publication summarizes some of the incentives offered by Better Buildings Neighborhood Program partners.

This report summarizes ongoing and recent policy developments that support utility investments in energy efficiency, including program cost recovery, fixed cost recovery, and performance incentives for electric utilities on a state-by-state basis.

This presentation provides an overview of PSE&G's Multifamily Housing Program, highlighting drivers, incentive structure, results, and lessons learned.

Presentation on how Michigan Saves realigned its incentives to encourage more projects with significant energy savings potential.

This presentation from Efficiency Maine shows early adopters and higher income residents tend to take advantage of large incentives, but smaller incentives may be a way to engage a broader range of income levels.

New York Home Performance with ENERGY STAR offers a series of training videos for new contractors covering topics such as creating processes and procedures to manage projects, consumer incentives and financing options, and Quality Assurance (QA) inspections.

This manual was developed for participating New York Home Performance with ENERGY STAR (HPwES) contractors. It contains information regarding program rules, incentives, and forms. The purpose of this manual is to help contractors understand and navigate the HPwES program.

RePower helped consumers access aggregated information about financing and rebates by compiling a customer-friendly guide to all utility and non-utility incentives in its service area.

This presentation provides an overview of New Jersey Clean Energy's approach to contractor engagement, including contractor participation requirements, procedures for quality assurance and quality control, production incentives, training procedures, and an online contractor portal.