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.

This summary from a Better Buildings Residential Network peer exchange call focused on how local governments have worked with trusted community organizations and their networks to drive demand. Speakers include the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Vermont Energy Investment Corporation.

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.

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 how to leverage HVAC upgrades into deeper home upgrades.

This summary from a Better Buildings Residential Network peer exchange call focused on approaches to improve and sustain quality customer service for residential energy efficiency work.

This summary from a Better Buildings Residential Network peer exchange call focused on how to involve homeowners in staged energy efficiency upgrades and what information is appropriate to share with them at each stage.

This summary from a Better Buildings Residential Network peer exchange call focused on how pet-based marketing can promote residential energy efficiency.

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.

This contractor process flowchart from EnergySmart Colorado includes the phases of contractor qualifications review and preparation, site work, and follow up.

Table summarizing financing options for Colorado residents in EnergySmart Colorado territory.

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.

Overview of lessons learned from EnergySmart Colorado's energy advisor model.

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

Example survey about a homeowner's experience with a visit from an energy advisor as part of EnergySmart in Boulder County, Colorado.

Philadelphia EnergyWorks helped sustain future programs by sharing marketing insights and program data with a local utility partner.

This peer exchange call summary focused on loan product structure and using market research to identify candidates for upgrades of occupied commercial buildings.

The objective of this document is to help state and local governments understand the role of program administrators (PAs) and assist them in developing successful partnerships with utility and other energy efficiency PAs. The majority of this paper presents information on partnering and leveraging current energy efficiency activities. However, it also includes information for governments in areas without active PAs, as well as an appendix with a case study describing how state and local governments can fill gaps and administer programs in the absence of a PA.

This peer exchange call summary focused on leveraging home inspectors and others in the real estate transaction processes.

In this video interview segment, Marty Treadway of Energy Smart Colorado discusses how to avoid contractor frustration by testing data collection tools before deployment.

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

This peer exchange call summary focused on sales training assistance programs for contractors.

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.

EnergyWorks' phased marketing campaign appeals to Philadelphia homeowners based on the current weather conditions.

Presentation on five steps to building a profitable contractor base. The steps include sensible program design and administration, certification and credentialing, communicating with contractors, contractor requirements (business vs. trade), and training and sales support.

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 peer exchange call summary focused on multifamily information technology tools for project information, marketing, assessment, tracking and evaluation.

Presentation that shares Marketing & Outreach lessons learned from Vermont.

In this video interview segment, Liz Robinson with EnergyWorks in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, talks about the faith-based partnerships EnergyWorks developed to help promote the program.

This presentation describes the New Jersey Clean Energy program and lessons learned on community engagement as a driver of demand.

This video describes the partnerships that EnergyWorks in Philadelphia established to offer classroom, lab, and in-field training to technicians to help them enter the home performance market.

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.

Presentation that focuses on grantee program-utility partnership models.

This video provides an overview of training a local workforce to meet program needs, including meeting the needs of local contractors for new hires.

In this video interview segment, Emily Levin of Vermont Energy Investment Corporation shares the importance of market research.

EnergySmart Colorado uses surveys and a customer database to get feedback from homeowners that helps fine-tune program services and operations.

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

This market assessment for the Boulder County EnergySmart and City and County of Denver energy efficiency loan program identifies the potential loan customers and demand for an energy efficiency upgrade financing program.

This guide from Boulder County's EnergySmart service is an example of expectations and guidelines for contractor operations.

Clean Energy Works Oregon's (now Enhabit's) experience implementing an on-bill financing program.

This webcast explores how faith-based organizations and their partners have used energy efficiency as an organizing motivator to upgrade the institutional building and then members' homes.

Outlines Philadelphia's EnergyWorks program's use of low-interest loans to incentivize homeowners by tying the interest rate to the number of energy efficiency measures incorporated into the home.

Example of a program design flowchart showing key steps and relationships for the energy efficiency program in Eagle County, Colorado.

Presentation providing an overview of financing programs, a strategy for continuous improvement, tools for program management, a risk management strategy, and common risks associated with financing programs.

Example of an implementation plan developed by EnergySmart Colorado at the beginning of the implementation of its Better Buildings Neighborhood Program.

This presentation provides a list of resources and tips for running a social media campaign.

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

This presentation explains how to engage and motivate contractors and utility companies through the use of commitments, creating a dynamic program that they can become involved with, and the setting of standards for contractors.

This webcast reports on the energy efficiency services sector workforce size, expectations for growth, and training needs and features a case studies from Efficiency Vermont and Efficiency Maine.

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.

Example Request for Proposal (RFP) to provide Boulder County, Colorado with support services for its Retrofit Ramp Up Program including a social mobilization campaign, database management services, and marketing/public relations services for the both the residential and commercial parts of the Program.

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 is a sample request for proposals (RFP) from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, for public information and marketing support.

A sample request for proposals from Boulder County, Colorado, to develop an energy efficiency and renewable energy rebate program.

This is a sample request for proposals (RFP) from Eagle County, Colorado, for marketing services.

This report summarizes the scale and economic value of energy efficiency for reducing carbon emissions and discusses barriers to achieving the potential for cost-effective energy efficiency.

Webcast with information on financing structure design for four energy efficiency upgrade programs, including methods used to conduct market evaluations.