This report is a guide to all customer-facing financing products—products offered by a lender directly to a borrower—used to pay for energy efficiency. Intended for state and local governments that are deciding whether to start a new program, tune up and existing program, or create a Green Bank, it provides information on the full range of financing product options for target participants, the tradeoffs of various products, and potential advantages and disadvantages for different types of customers.

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.

In this video interview segment, Yvonne Kraus of Conservation Services Group describes how the program aligned its goal of increasing energy efficiency with the community's goal to avoid building a new electrical substation.

In this video interview segment, Yvonne Kraus of Conservation Services Group describes how energy advisors were an important strategy for building trust with customers in the community.

Quick summaries of strategies various programs have used to improve the efficiency of delivering efficiency.

This report presents the results of ACEEE's third national review or utility-funded energy efficiency programs, completed in 2013. The report identifies and profiles 63 leading programs that span the wide array of program types offered to utility customers, and highlights key trends and observations that emerged from reviewing these programs.

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 video describes how RePower benefited from coordinating with contractors from the very beginning.

This paper explores ways in which program administrators are using social norms to spur behavior change and, as a result, curb energy use. In recent years, home energy reports (HER) programs have applied the concept of social norms to the energy efficiency context. These feedback programs inform customers of how their energy consumption compares to their neighbors' and provide other information about their usage, with the goal of enticing customers to change their energy use behavior to improve their relative neighborhood ranking.

Descriptions of eight county-level and city-level energy efficiency programs in the Southwest.

In this video interview segment, Yvonne Kraus of Conservation Services Group describes how program and utility partnerships can co-benefit each other.

In this video interview segment, Will Ranes of RePower Kitsap discusses the importance of understanding your market, including being able to speak the language of utilities and other key players.

This presentation includes the brands, website addresses, and images for most of the Better Buildings Neighborhood Program partners.

This peer exchange call summary focused on what energy efficiency programs are doing to target low- and moderate-income households.

This guide helps states and localities develop voluntary or mandatory programs that go well beyond minimum code requirements for new buildings. It addresses energy efficiency materials and resource conservation, water efficiency, indoor environmental quality, and site development and land use.