This summary from a Better Buildings Residential Network peer exchange call focused on implementing process improvements using lean processes, an approach of continuous improvement, use of Standardized Workforce Specifications (SWS) to improve quality, and contractor feedback tools. It features speakers from DOE, New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA), and Arizona Home Performance.

This presentation discusses E4TheFuture's report, Occupant Health Benefits of Residential Energy Efficiency, which reviews existing research on residential EE measures and associated health impacts, discusses ways that programs can monetize occupant health co-benefits, highlights innovative programs that combine energy efficiency and health-focused home repairs, and identifies research gaps and strategies to help advance and leverage funding across such integrated efforts.

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.

The adoption of intelligent efficiency applications is increasing across multiple sectors of the economy. This report analyzes over two dozen of these applications in the buildings, manufacturing, transportation, and government sectors. We describe the technologies involved, characterize their use, and quantify their deployment. We also look at several enabling and cross-cutting technologies and the use of intelligent efficiency in utility-sector energy efficiency programs.

The adoption of intelligent efficiency applications is increasing across multiple sectors of the economy. This report analyzes over two dozen of these applications in the buildings, manufacturing, transportation, and government sectors. We describe the technologies involved, characterize their use, and quantify their deployment. We also look at several enabling and cross-cutting technologies and the use of intelligent efficiency in utility-sector energy efficiency programs.

This summary from a Better Buildings Residential Network peer exchange call focused on behavior change program design and design thinking to increase program reach. It features speakers from See Change Institute, Efficiency Vermont, and Navitas Partners, Inc.

This report updates ACEEE's 2013 assessment of multifamily energy efficiency programs in US metropolitan areas with the most multifamily households. Using housing, policy, and utility-sector data from 2014 and 2015, this report documents how these programs have changed in the context of dynamic housing markets and statewide policy environments. The report also offers an analysis of the number, spending, offerings, and targeted participants of current programs and their potential for further expansion.

This report examines the history of pay-for-performance (P4P) energy efficiency approaches. As the report describes, there is a diverse spectrum of pay-for-performance programs but, at the most basic level, these programs track and reward energy savings as they occur, usually by examining data from a building's energy meters -- as opposed to the more common approach of estimating savings in advance of installation and offering upfront rebates or incentives in a lump-sum payment. The report finds that P4P has some important opportunities for increasing energy savings, but also key limitations that will need to be better understood through piloting and experimentation.

This presentation introduces the Energy Programs Consortium report, Residential Property Assessed Clean Energy (R-PACE) - A Primer for State and Local Energy Officials. It also covers R-PACE statistics, program details, comparisons with other financing options, and consumer protections.

Each ResStock fact sheet presents the potential for residential energy and utility bill savings for the state. The top ten energy savings home improvements are highlighted.

This presentation features Better Buildings Challenge Multifamily partners across the country sharing what's worked and what hasn't in residential rehabilitation and weatherization of income-eligible, public housing multifamily buildings. Speakers shared case studies about their properties that have undergone upgrades during the past year and the lessons learned.

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 report examines how State Energy Offices and state-level partners are supporting growth and uptake of Commercial Property Assessed Clean Energy (C-PACE) financing around the country. The report offers examples, insights, and strategies for State Energy Offices, green banks, state financing agencies, and other public and private entities to catalyze, accelerate, organize, and expand C-PACE markets.

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.

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 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 summary from a Better Buildings Residential Network peer exchange call focused on approaches organizations can use to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of home upgrade programs, including strategies to streamline data entry and make continuous process improvements.

This report discusses indoor air quality issues, including: wildfire smoke, dampness, and mold, and the effect of energy efficiency upgrades on these health-related issues. The report describes current state policies and programs in these areas, highlighting approaches for consideration by other jurisdictions.

Achieving energy savings goals and improving customer and contractor satisfaction while staying cost-effective makes managing home energy upgrade programs challenging. DOE's Home Upgrade Program Accelerator is working with program administrators to identify strategies that overcome challenges and achieve better results. The Arizona Home Performance with ENERGY STAR program completed process improvements that improved contractor satisfaction and deceased quality assurance labor.  Build It Green implemented software improvements to their utility program's online rebate applications portal to accelerate data processing.

This summary from a Better Buildings Residential Network peer exchange call focused on opportunities and challenges in the Southeast and holistic, whole house approaches for working in hot and humid climates.

Better Buildings Home Upgrade Program Accelerator partners, Build It Green, Enhabit, and NeighborWorks of Western Vermont, discussed steps for streamlining program processes, and strategies to improve data management, contractor relationships, and customer experiences. Tools and resources were presented as examples of how these ideas can be implemented in programs across the country.

Energy burden is the percentage of household income spent on home energy bills. In this report, ACEEE, along with the Energy Efficiency for All coalition, measures the energy burden of households in 48 of the largest American cities. The report finds that low-income, African-American, Latino, low-income multifamily, and renter households all spend a greater proportion of their income on utilities than the average family. The report also identifies energy efficiency as an underutilized strategy that can help reduce high energy burdens by as much as 30%. Given this potential, the report goes on to describe policies and programs to ramp up energy efficiency investments in low-income and underserved communities.

This report was developed to help inform national stakeholders about the strategies that have been used to achieve deep energy savings in the multifamily housing sector through energy efficiency upgrades. These strategies could be used as models in areas where utility program administrators and policymakers seek to achieve deep energy savings in the multifamily building stock for the purposes of reducing energy costs, creating comfortable and healthy homes, meeting regulatory requirements, or reducing the environmental impacts of energy consumption. This report includes a national multifamily market characterization, barriers and opportunities for program and policy efforts, and eight exemplary case studies from across the country.

The benefits of energy efficiency upgrades beyond money and energy savings include non-energy benefits that are often not communicated well. Multiple non-energy benefits include lower home maintenance costs, improved air quality and less sick days for adults and children, greater resiliency, and lower emissions. This presentation covers examples of how your program can fully realize the potential from all of these multiple non-energy benefits.

Residential air-source heat pumps (ASHP) are a heating and air-conditioning technology that use electricity to provide a combination of space heating and cooling to homes. A new generation of ASHPs has come to market over the past five years. This report evaluates the key market barriers as well as potential opportunities to leverage. Based on an assessment of the regional ASHP market, it is clear that while ASHPs have established a viable and growing market, there remains a significant opportunity to further accelerate adoption of the technology and in the process achieve energy and cost savings to the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic region.

This summary from a Better Buildings Residential Network peer exchange call focused on strategies that can be used to promote energy efficiency programs for manufactured homes. Speakers include Collaborative Efficiency, Wisconsin Energy Conservation Corporation, and East Kentucky Power Cooperative.

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 webinar covers the Multifamily Energy Efficiency Retrofits: Barriers and Opportunities for Deep Energy Savings report published in 2016.n

This summary from a Better Buildings Residential Network peer exchange call focused on integrating health and home performance and discussed connecting energy efficiency and health.

Energy efficiency is good for you--and for the air you breathe, the water you drink, and the community in which you live. This fact sheet shows how saving energy reduces air and water pollution and conserves natural resources, which in turn creates a healthier living environment for people everywhere. It includes the stories of a family in Pennsylvania and a hospital in Florida.

This guide for states highlights energy efficiency as a least-cost strategy to meet air pollution reduction and other policy objectives, including energy affordability and reliability. It presents established policy and program “pathways” to advance demand-side energy efficiency.

This report identifies sustainable funding sources for asthma-related home interventions. It examines the business case and return on investment for interventions that remedy triggers that can exacerbate asthma.

This summary from a Better Buildings Residential Network peer exchange call focused on Property-Assessed Clean Energy Programs (PACE) and its implementation in California and Vermont.

Home energy management systems (HEMS) continue to present a unique opportunity and challenge. While energy savings have been documented for many HEMS, some of the most promising opportunities from these devices and systems can be found in the internet of things (IoT) and smart home technologies. This report presents market updates, a regional goal, and strategies to drive market transformation and achieve the many benefits from HEMS and the Smart Energy Home.

NEEP has been tracking the residential lighting market for several years and has provided analysis in many reports. As the transformation of this complex market gains traction, we find the conversation and need for new information narrowing to one key topic: LEDs. While CFLs continue to play a role in residences and amongst Northeast and Mid-Atlantic program administrators, the LED has transitioned into the starring role of the residential lighting show.

This report represents NEEP’s annual assessment of the major policy developments of 2014, as well as its look into the immediate future, where NEEP gauge states’ progress toward capturing cost-effective energy efficiency as a first-order resource. While looking at the region as a whole, NEEP also provides summary and analysis of some of the biggest building energy efficiency successes and setbacks from Maine to Maryland — including significant energy efficiency legislation and regulations and changes in funding levels for energy efficiency programs.

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.

The Guide to Action provides in-depth information about over a dozen policies and programs that states are using to meet their energy, environmental, and economic objectives with energy efficiency, renewable energy, and combined heat and power. Each policy description is based on states’ experiences in designing and implementing policies, as documented in existing literature and shared through peer-exchange opportunities provided to states by EPA’s State Climate and Energy Program.

Energy efficiency collaboratives vary greatly and are typically designed for a specific jurisdiction, making them hard to compare side by side. This guide seeks to highlight a few common elements and draw conclusions on the overall effectiveness of specific characteristics of collaboratives. This guide defines and examines four different types of collaboratives in terms of their origin, scope, decision-making method, membership, duration, available resources, and how they interact with and influence their respective commissions.

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 three programs that would engage homeowners in energy efficiency programs.

This summary from a Better Buildings Residential Network peer exchange call focused on combining solar and home performance 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 summary from a Better Buildings Residential Network peer exchange call focused on the benefits and disadvantages of combining solar and home performance goals simultaneously.

This summary report provides scientific results, lessons learned, and recommendations for driving energy efficiency in existing buildings on an urban scale. It includes program marketing lesson learned, such as: personal outreach and call to action events are critical marketing opportunities.

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.

In this video interview segment, Ludy Biddle with Neighborworks of Western Vermont describes the benefits of one-on-one communications between customers and the Neighborhood H.E.A.T. Squad program's energy advisors.

This webcast discusses the background for U.S. Department of Energy’s Smart Grid Investment Grant (SGIG) consumer behavior study effort; the various utilities who are participating and what they each plan to include their respective studies; the quantitative results and qualitative lessons learned thus far from these studies; and the types of research will be undertaken by LBNL over the next several years.

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

This summary from a Better Buildings Residential Network peer exchange call focused on introducing and building interest in multi-family energy efficiency.

This radio interview highlights how the NeighborWorks program in Vermont is raising awareness of home energy efficiency measures among residents through neighbor-to-neighbor outreach.

This study looks at evidence of capitalization of energy efficiency features in home prices using data from real estate multiple listing services (MLS) in three metropolitan areas: the Research Triangle region of North Carolina; Austin, Texas; and Portland, Oregon. These home listings include information on Energy Star certification and, in Portland and Austin, local green certifications. Our results suggest that Energy Star certification increases the sales prices of homes built between 1995 and 2006 but has no statistically significant effect on sales prices for newer homes.

This peer exchange call summary focused on moving from assessments to upgrades in multifamily buildings.

This webcast reviews the SEE Action report that describes how utility planning processes that allow demand-side resources to compete with supply-side resources can promote cost-effective energy efficiency.

This peer exchange call summary focused on the challenges, benefits, quality assurance methods and incorporation of do-it-yourself projects into programs.

This report provides results, lessons learned and recommendations for driving energy efficiency in existing building on an urban scale based on the second year of the Energize Phoenix energy efficiency program.

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

Presentation describing the San Antonio program and tactics used to drive demand and enhance service delivery to make the program simpler for customers.

Presentation that focuses on grantee program-utility partnership models.

This peer exchange call summary focused on the challenges and strategies for marketing commercial financial products and attracting financial institutions.

This policy brief describes how Austin Energy's Home Performance with ENERGY STAR program worked with its lending partner, Velocity Credit, to originate almost 1,800 loans, totaling approximately $12.5 million.

This report provides state and local policymakers with information on successful approaches to the design and implementation of residential efficiency programs for households ineligible for low-income programs.

This report provides results, lessons learned and recommendations for driving energy efficiency in existing building on an urban scale based on the first year of the Energize Phoenix energy efficiency program.

This report describes different approaches to energy efficiency finance taken by utilities.

This report provides an overview of residential customer information and behavior efficiency programs, and identifies key challenges to and solutions for increasing the penetration of these programs nationwide.

This report helps policymakers understand how electric and natural gas utilities can achieve greater efficiency by establishing numeric energy savings targets and goals for energy efficiency programs.

This case study describes Austin Energy's short-term, comprehensive rebate/financing offer to jump-start participation and valuable lessons learned along the way.

This case study discusses strategies that Austin Energy, a municipally owned utility, used to collaborate closely with building contractors to launch a new Best Offer Ever promotion quickly and effectively.

Building on its understanding of homeowners in Rutland County, Vermont, NeighborWorks of Western Vermont (NWWVT) enlisted respected local citizens and organizations to spread the word about home energy efficiency upgrade opportunities, an effort that helped drive demand for nearly 200 home upgrades in just six months

This report describes how utility planning processes that allow demand-side resources to compete with supply-side resources can promote cost-effective energy efficiency.

This peer exchange call summary focused on available program interest rates and how to lower those rates.

This report identifies and discusses factors that should be considered in evaluating model choices for administering and implementing ratepayer funded energy efficiency programs.

A project planning timetable template from Austin Energy that reflects all program planning activities, including marketing.

This report summarizes existing research and discusses current practices, opportunities, and barriers to coordinating energy efficiency and demand response programs.

This report presents best practices for operating successful portfolio-level efficiency programs, including assessing efficiency potential, cost-effectiveness screening, and developing a portfolio of approaches.

This report considers consumers' perspectives on policy and regulatory issues associated with the administration of energy efficiency investments funded by ratepayers of electric and natural gas utilities.

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.

This webcast featured four presentations providing examples and best practices for revolving loan funds.

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.

This report provides guidance on determining the efficiency potential in a utility footprint, state, or region; evaluating efficiency as a supply-side resource; and developing detailed efficiency program plans.

This report describes the key issues, best practices, and main process steps for integrating energy efficiency into resource planning on an equal basis with other resources.

To help inform and prompt discussion across a range of audiences on the health co-benefits from residential EE investments, this paper reviews research studies of residential EE and related ventilation upgrades, discusses ways that programs have monetized occupant health co-benefits, and highlights innovative programs that combine EE and health-focused home repairs. The paper concludes with identifying research gaps and strategies to help advance such work.