This case study highlights the low-income programs of Efficiency Vermont, the nation’s first public energy efficiency utility, which aims to reduce these customers' high energy burden, freeing up money that they can spend on food, housing, and other necessities. These low-income programs have saved enough electricity to power nearly 8,000 Vermont households for a year and offer solutions that eliminate or reduce up-front costs for residents, a typical barrier to improving energy efficiency in low-income households. Its multifamily energy efficiency program helps renters and building owners save energy, addressing the “split incentive” barrier in which owners have little reason to invest in efficiency measures that benefit tenants who pay their own energy bills.

This report provides an annual savings claim summary and includes case studies and customer testimonials from homeowners, towns, and businesses that Efficiency Vermont served in 2016.

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 report details opportunities for scaling up program activity and increasing savings from programs reaching the people who need it most. It discussed best practices from existing programs for overcoming many of the key challenges that program administrators face, including how to address housing deficiencies that prevent energy efficiency upgrades, how to address cost effectiveness challenges, and how to serve hard-to-reach households.

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 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 webcast covers a report that is a comparative analysis of utility-run behavior programs, which lays the groundwork for further program development by developing a classification scheme, or taxonomy, that sorts programs into discrete categories.

This resource provides best practices and highlights case studies for how utilities, policymakers, building managers, and community stakeholders can improve access to energy usage data while working towards the goal of improving efficiency in their communities.

This summary from a Better Buildings Residential Network peer exchange call focused on how a residential energy efficiency program can work with, for or as utilities.

Example credit application from Fayette County Better Buildings.

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

Instructional step-by-step guide for visiting a home to discuss and install energy efficiency measures.

This summary from a Better Buildings Residential Network peer exchange call focused on bringing energy efficiency programs to schools.

The lack of documented value of retrofit measures is a barrier to many homeowners doing upgrades - as most appraisals do not include energy improvements in their comparables, and the home’s future sale can prevent the homeowner from earning a return on their investment via lower energy costs. Once the industry develops a process for valuing the energy improvements, it can unlock the significant potential for retrofit work through market pricing signals (energy efficient homes are worth more) and enhanced access to capital for those purchasing a more efficient home (energy efficient homes improve borrowers’ cashflow because they cost less to operate).

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

In this video interview segment, Emily Levin of Vermont Energy Investment Corporation talks about how there is no silver bullet and its about creating a new industry, which takes time.

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 case study discusses strategies that Fayette County, Pennsylvania used to provide Building Performance Institute (BPI) certification and business skills training to aspiring energy efficiency contractors.

This peer exchange call summary focused on the strategies, challenges and key interaction points with the real estate sector.

This lease agreement is an example of an equipment lease from the Fayette County equipment loan program for contractors.

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

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

This webcast discusses door-to-door campaigns and how to track the impacts of these campaigns.

This guide provides an assessment of various approaches to Marketing & Outreach for home energy efficiency improvements.

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.

This webcast presents lessons learned in marketing, communication, and outreach, including lessons related to marketing plans.