This study provides an overview of practices for quantifying and reporting avoided energy-water costs from demand-side measures. It also summarizes the regulatory guidance for incorporating water savings into cost-effectiveness screening for energy efficiency programs.
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Energy Trust of Oregon’s contractor selection tips provide several considerations for choosing an energy efficiency contractor.
This document profiles the Chicago-area non-profit Elevate Energy, which offers a full-service energy efficiency retrofit program for owners of and tenants in affordable multifamily buildings in eleven states.
This flyer provides information about the program's upgrade process, financing, benefits of the program and of home energy upgrades, and eligibility requirements.
This presentation provides an overview of the Energy Savers program for affordable rental housing, its loan structure, and lessons learned.
This tool from Focus on Energy connects Wisconsin residents and businesses with local home performance contractors that provide various energy efficiency services and offers a list of each contractor's skills.
This calendar provides Focus on Energy's participating contractors with information on upcoming technical training opportunities, such as conferences, lighting demonstrations, and home efficiency sales and marketing workshops.
The Trade Ally Code of Conduct outlines the expectations and guidelines related to participation as a registered Trade Ally in the Focus on Energy Program.
This summary from a Better Buildings Residential Network peer exchange call focused on key challenges and opportunities for working with HVAC contractors to shift toward high-impact energy-efficient HVAC solutions. Speakers include DOE and the Energy Trust of Oregon.
This calendar provides Illinois Home Performance's participating contractors with information on upcoming residential energy efficiency trainings or events on topics such as HVAC quality installation and an introduction to building science.
This free hotline is provided by Illinois Home Performance to help homeowners and energy professionals find quick answers to building science questions.
This summary from a Better Buildings Residential Network peer exchange call focused on key challenges and opportunities to deploy neighborhood energy programs. Speakers include the City of Orlando, SEEDS, and Research Into Action, Inc.
This report provides a comprehensive review and analysis of home energy upgrade programs with proven track records, focusing on those with robustly verified savings and constituting good examples for replication. This meta-analysis describes program models and implementation strategies for direct install upgrades; heating, HVAC replacement and early retirement; and comprehensive, whole-home upgrades.
This summary from a Better Buildings Residential Network peer exchange call focused on unique challenges for energy efficiency and weatherization programs serving lower income residents in single-family and multifamily housing. Speakers include American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, Elevate Energy, and Energy Outreach Colorado.
This summary from a Better Buildings Residential Network peer exchange call summary focused on leveraging smart tech, health and/or utility data to increase participation in multifamily energy efficiency programs. It featured speakers from The Network for Energy, Water and Health in
Affordable Buildings, New Ecology, Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition, and Emerald Cities Collaborative.
Peer Exchange Call: Home Performance with ENERGY STAR and Home Energy Score Integration
Focus on Energy, Columbia Water & Light, and utilities from the Energize Connecticut program share how they integrate and implement the Home Energy Score and Home Performance with ENERGY STAR programs.
This summary from a Better Buildings Residential Network peer exchange call focused on key challenges and opportunities to deploy interactive engagement strategies including customer segmentation, loyalty and reward programs, and gamification. It features speakers from Fiveworx, ICF International, and Cool Choices.
This Technical Reference Manual (TRM) defines the consensus calculations of the electric and natural gas energy savings and the electric demand reductions, achieved from installing energy efficiency and renewable energy measures that are supported by Focus on Energy programs.
This summary from a Better Buildings Residential Network peer exchange call focused on how home energy upgrade programs can interact and connect with the real estate market.
This summary from a Better Buildings Residential Network peer exchange call focused on ensuring contractor networks work for both energy efficiency programs and participating contractors.
This webcast in a multi-part series highlighting efforts by state and local agencies, non-profits, and utilities to bring energy efficiency and renewable energy (EE/RE) to low-income communities.
Energy efficiency savings have grown substantially in the past ten years, and national leaders in program administration have emerged as savings levels have increased. This report reviews annual program performance for 14 leading energy efficiency program administrators, with a focus on costs, electricity savings, cost effectiveness, and portfolio design.
This case study features Better Buildings Residential Network members Elevate Energy and the International Center for Appropriate and Sustainable Technology (ICAST), nonprofit members that develop energy efficiency solutions for multifamily and affordable housing communities.
This report explores how governments and energy efficiency implementers could help stakeholders better analyze and act upon building performance data to unlock savings.
This report identifies opportunities for Connecticut's Home Energy Solutions program (HES) to increase savings related to air sealing, duct sealing, and insulation.
This summary from a Better Buildings Residential Network peer exchange call focused on communicating non-energy benefits that homeowners and building owners are most interested in. Speakers include Elevate Energy, Green & Healthy Homes Initiative, and Skumatz Economic Research Associates, Inc.
This paper examines the current state of energy efficiency financing, highlighting segments of strength such as cars, green buildings, and energy service companies, and offering areas that are underserved, including residential low-income and moderate-income households and multifamily housing.
This case study addresses multifamily energy upgrade experiences by two members of the Better Buildings Residential Network—Elevate Energy and the International Center for Appropriate and Sustainable Technology (ICAST).
Focus on Energy created these co-branding and logo requirements that trade allies, or participating contractors, must adhere to when creating marketing materials related to the program.
This paper analyzes Bank of America's $55 million initiative to provide low-cost funding and grant support to advance energy efficiency investment in low- to moderate-income communities. The funding supported community development financial institutions (CDFIs) in developing and enhancing efficiency programs for residential, commercial, and multifamily buildings. We report on loan performance, energy savings, and the degree to which the savings offset the cost of the energy efficiency investment.
The Better Buildings Home Energy Information Accelerator aims to make energy data more accessible to home buyers, realtors and others. This presentation covers how Colorado launched a statewide residential labeling initiative that made home energy data available at point of sale, and how partnerships in the Northeast are incorporating energy efficiency into the Multiple Listing Service (MLS), with Vermont pioneering the regional effort.
In this project, the U.S. Department of Energy Building America team Partnership for Advanced Residential Retrofit (PARR) worked with Elevate Energy on three tasks: to conduct pre- and post-retrofit analysis on the income and expense data of 13 Chicago-area multifamily buildings, to compare Chicago income and expense data to two national samples, and to explore the ramifications that energy-efficiency retrofits have on nine Chicago-area neighborhoods.
The multifamily sector can be hard to reach when it comes to energy efficiency programs. Besides being diverse and complex, the sector presents a unique set of challenges to efficiency investments. The result is that multifamily customers are often underserved by energy efficiency programs. Drawing on data requests and interviews with program administrators, this report summarizes the challenges to program participation and identifies best practices that programs can use to reach and retain large numbers of multifamily participants.
This peer exchange call summary focused on best practices for building and maintaining a robust contractor network.
The Better Buildings Neighborhood Program featured 41 competitively selected grantees that developed sustainable energy efficiency upgrade programs across the U.S. from 2010-14. This presentation covers what worked and what didn’t, and key success factors identified by an independent evaluation.
This summary from a Better Buildings Residential Network peer exchange call focused on strategies for contractor training.
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 document summarizes top marketing and outreach takeaways shared by Better Buildings Residential Network members during spring 2015 Peer Exchange Calls.
The Community Power Works program in Seattle, WA uses a program dashboard to track progress against targets. This is an example dashboard from March 2015, which is updated on a monthly basis with progress toward goals for sign-ups, energy audits, home energy upgrades, and energy savings.
This summary from a Better Buildings Residential Network peer exchange call focused on approaches to generate demand for energy efficiency upgrades at multifamily buildings.
This summary from a Better Buildings Residential Network peer exchange call focused on standardization of effective practices across a program territory.
This summary from a Better Buildings Residential Network peer exchange call focused on the advantages, challenges, and effective creation and management of statewide energy efficiency alliances.
This guide identifies 12 best practices for policymakers, regulators, and program administrators to help building owners invest to increase the energy efficiency of multifamily affordable housing.
The benefits of energy efficiency extend beyond energy savings. Homes, commercial buildings, and industrial facilities gain comfort, health, and safety benefits from energy efficiency programs. Additional benefits for businesses include savings on maintenance, materials, and the costs of regulatory compliance. On the supply side, electric utilities enjoy reduced system costs. Focusing on the residential, business, and utility sectors, this report examines each of these multiple benefits, their role in program marketing, and current best practices for including them in cost-effectiveness testing.
This study documents the market valuation associated with the predominant green and energy efficiency home certifications used in the Northwest. Regional markets with a track record of including green building and energy efficiency information in MLS databases have lacked a recent, thorough, locally relevant analysis of the potential value of “higher performing” homes in current market conditions. Real property appraisers require a reliable, localized, granular analysis they can use in their home valuation calculations. The analysis contained in this report addresses this identified market need.
This summary from a Better Buildings Residential Network peer exchange call focused on how energy efficiency initiatives relate to real estate marketing.
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.
This paper describes existing barriers to integrating energy efficiency data into real estate markets, and illustrates recent efforts to address them. National cross-industry collaborations have resulted in standard data collection and transfer tools that allow home performance data to be shared across industries. Real estate markets in some regions have begun including these data into multiple listing services (MLS), making them visible during real estate transactions.
This infographic illustrates program accomplishments between 2011 and 2014.
Evaluation of Missed Energy Saving Opportunity Based on Illinois Home Performance Program Field Data
This report builds and expands off of previous research by collecting and evaluating data from 800 Illinois Home Performance (IHP) retrofits. This study investigates homeowner measure package choices in the Illinois Home Performance with ENERGY STAR® (IHP) program compared to cost-optimal choices determined through Building Energy Optimization (BEopt™) modeling software.
Illinois Home Performance provides co-branding opportunities for participating contractors, including co-branding on program marketing materials.
Summary of minimum standards and requirements for the Massachusetts HEAT Loan program.
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.
This summary from a Better Buildings Residential Network peer exchange call focused on quality assurance and control, standardization of upgrades and workforce expectations.
Quick summaries of strategies various programs have used to improve the efficiency of delivering efficiency.
This presentation answers the questions of why and how to quantify the air quality impacts of energy efficiency policies and programs.
This summary from a Better Buildings Residential Network peer exchange call focused on working with the real estate sector to promote and drive demand for energy efficiency.
This peer exchange call summary focused on the challenges, advantages and disadvantages of using a home scoring system.
This publication summarizes some of the incentives offered by Better Buildings Neighborhood Program partners.
This peer exchange call summary focused on how to calculate and communicate program activities and results.
This practitioner-focused Toolkit for Residential Energy Efficiency Upgrade Programs was created by Green For All to assist new, established, and future energy efficiency programs launch and scale initiatives that can deliver the full promise of the green economy. It is intended as a practical resource that offers examples, tools, and templates that a program manager can deploy to implement a variety of aspects of their program including best practice briefs and summary documents, RFPs, contracts, and other program design and implementation templates that communities nationwide have used to create their own efficiency programs.
This report covers how to create high road standards and use the momentum of energy sector projects to create safe, well-paying, long-term careers for a diverse group of people. It includes case studies on Community Power Works in Seattle, Washington, and Clean Energy Works Oregon's (now Enhabit's) efforts to use community high road agreements.
This peer exchange call summary focused on grant funding investments, program design and revenue streams in the post-grant period.
This peer exchange call summary focused on the challenges and strategies for marketing commercial financial products and attracting financial institutions.
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 a general overview and implementation plan of the PACE program.
This report describes different approaches to energy efficiency finance taken by utilities.
Financing Programs: RFP & Contract Terms and Conditions
This webcast discusses financing program RFPs and contract terms and conditions.
Survey for consultants participating in Green Madison and Me2 programs about their experiences with the programs.
How to Design and Market Energy Efficiency Programs to Specific Neighborhoods
This webcast offers information on successful marketing strategies, as well as design considerations and market research insights for creating and marketing successful projects in specific neighborhoods.
Leveraging Partnerships with Faith-Based Organizations
This peer exchange call summary focused on the different types of evaluation methods for residential and commercial programs.
This paper describes a wide variety of behavior change insights potentially applicable to the energy efficiency program context, provides examples of efficiency programs that have applied these insights, and explores some untapped opportunities to achieve energy savings through behavior change.
This paper, which is based on detailed case studies of nine existing state and local programs, presents recommendations for energy upgrade programs to facilitate industry growth and support contractor business models.
This agreement outlines the goals, contractor standards, hiring standards, training program standards, and procedures for contractor participation in Seattle's Community Power Works program. As a "high-road" agreement, the employment and contracting standards are designed to ensure broad access to economic opportunities for all types of businesses and workers, support training on sustainable career paths, and ensure high-quality work.
This is a community workforce agreement between the City of Milwaukee and the Wisconsin Energy Conservation Corporation.
Designing Effective Incentives to Drive Residential Retrofit Program Participation
This webcast covers information about designing effective incentives to drive residential retrofit program participation.
This guide provides background on the home improvement market in the U.S. and Canada and end users and systems in existing homes, as well as a description of energy efficiency program approaches and strategies.
Summary of the standards that support job quality, equitable access and quality assurance in several residential energy efficiency programs from different parts of the country.
This guide describes a structure and several model approaches for calculating energy, demand, and emissions savings resulting from energy efficiency programs that are implemented by cities, states, utilities, companies, and similar entities.