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.

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 paper investigates the credit enhancement value of NYSERDA's on-bill energy efficiency financing program relative to its similar conventional unsecured loan program. In the raw data, while both loan pools perform well relative to credit card lending, the on-bill loans default more often than the unsecured loans. This paper shows that this result persists: on-bill loans default more often, and this finding is not sensitive to model specification. This paper also shows that NYSERDA's alternate underwriting mechanism based on mortgage and utility bill repayment history performs well, and that projected dollar savings from the installed projects do not significantly influence loan performance.

Among the many benefits ascribed to energy efficiency is the fact that it can help create jobs. Although this is often used to motivate investments in efficiency programs, verifying job creation benefits is more complicated than it might seem at first. This paper identifies some of the issues that contribute to a lack of consistency in attempts to verify efficiency-related job creation. It then proposes an analytically rigorous and tractable framework for program evaluators to use in future assessments.

The report makes the case for establishment of common data collection practices for energy efficiency lending. The report reviews existing practices for the collection of four categories of data from energy efficiency financing programs: (1) customer data; (2) financial product and performance data; (3) facility-level data; and (4) energy efficiency project data. The report then identifies high-priority needs, characterizes potential uses for finance program data, and identifies use cases that describe how stakeholders use data for key objectives and actions.

This report provides an overview of considerations for designing and implementing successful energy efficiency financing programs for existing buildings in the residential and commercial sectors. Information on key issues related to energy efficiency financing programs, guidance to existing resources that provide more in-depth financing program design and implementation information, and strategies for delivering broad customer access to attractive financing products that enhance customer capacity and willingness to invest in energy efficiency to address "first cost" barriers are included.

There are more than 17 million multifamily households nationwide, yet they remain a significant and mostly untapped opportunity for energy efficiency gains. Many cities and states that have embraced energy retrofitting as a job creator and boon to both the environment and economy have yet to address potential savings in multifamily properties, primarily because of obstacles not faced by single family and commercial properties. This paper discusses two barriers -- a lack of information and financing -- that stand in the way of multifamily energy retrofits.

Reviews and summarize energy efficiency financing models and strategies. Models are analyzed according to funding sources, program structures, limits to scale, repayment vehicles, and project risks. Strategies consider applicable building sectors, models, levels of establishment, growth potential, advantages, and disadvantages.

This fact sheet provides promising approaches for Better Buildings programs seeking to accelerate workforce development to support building energy upgrades. These approaches are organized by estimated level of effort and include rough estimates of cost ranges for implementation.

This report addresses a key bottleneck for private capital: lenders declining to underwrite energy efficiency loans for multifamily housing because they lack confidence in energy savings. It presents findings from an analysis of 230+ buildings, assesses total savings achieved and savings as a percentage of projections, and provides a starting point for an underwriting methodology.

This policy brief describes the energy efficiency financing options programs can use to help financial institutions make energy upgrades affordable and accessible to homeowners.

This publication outlines capital leveraging models and examples from across the country in which public funds were used to influence energy loan program capital.

Outlines five public-private financing mechanism options for energy efficiency upgrades programs, including on-bill financing, PACE financing, and loan loss reserve funds.

This report presents a review of selected home energy auditing tools. The energy audit tools reviewed in this study include REM/Rate, BEACON Home Energy Advisor, EnergyInsights, Home Energy Tune-uP, EnergyGauge, TREAT, the National Energy Audit Tool (NEAT), Home Energy Saver Professional (HESPro), and RealHomeAnalyzer.