With project funding from Energize NY PACE and incentives from NYSERDA's Multifamily program, Natlew Corporation was able to make energy efficiency upgrades to their multifamily affordable housing complex in Mount Vernon, NY.

This presentation provides an overview of energy efficiency financing for low- and moderate-income households, including a sector overview, consumer protections, financing products, and lessons learned.

This summary from a Better Buildings Residential Network peer exchange call emphasizes the health benefits of upgrades to make your program relevant to potential partners and audiences. Speakers include the City of Fort Collins, Colorado and  Green & Healthy Homes Initiative Greater Syracuse, Home Headquarters.

This presentation includes examples of 16 programs' creative marketing materials.  The Better Buildings Residential Network held a March Madness tournament to find the most creative residential energy efficiency messages during March Peer Exchange Calls. Sixteen marketing campaigns were featured in a bracket challenge on the calls, and participants made their picks. Residential Network member the Fuel Fund of Maryland was chosen as the winning message for its Watt Watchers campaign.

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 how organizations can diversify and grow new revenue streams and types of financing approaches used to make resources stretch further and help homeowners finance upgrades. Speakers include Connecticut Green Bank, Sealed, and Craft3.

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 case study features New York City Energy Efficiency Corporation (NYCEEC), a member that focuses on financing energy efficiency and clean energy upgrades for multifamily buildings in the city and surrounding communities.

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.

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 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 Better Buildings Residential Network Social Media toolkit can be used to help residential energy efficiency programs learn to engage potential customers through social media. Social media can build brand awareness concerning home energy upgrades and the entities working on them, which can lead to more energy upgrade projects taking place in the long run. This toolkit will help program managers and their staff with decisions like what social media works best for various program needs. When aligned with other marketing and outreach efforts, social media can be a useful tool in attracting home energy upgrade customers. Note that social media changes constantly, so users of this toolkit need to regularly reassess their methods and review results to ensure goals are being met.

This presentation covers the New York On-Bill recovery financing, Home Energy Lending Program's (H.E.L.P.) loan program, and California energy efficiency financing products.

This summary from a Better Buildings Residential Network peer exchange call focused on how to market energy efficiency upgrades in the multifamily housing sector.

This report lays the groundwork for a dialogue to explore regulatory and policy mechanisms for ensuring that efficiency financing initiatives provide value for society and protection for consumers. Through case studies of Connecticut, New York, Massachusetts, California, and Maryland, it explores emerging issues that jurisdictions will need to tackle when considering an increased reliance on financing.

This page contains annual and monthly update reports of the Green Jobs-Green New York program.

A number of states are beginning to recognize Demand Reduction Induced Price Effects (DRIPE) as a real, quantifiable benefit of energy efficiency and demand response programs. DRIPE is a measurement of the value of demand reductions in terms of the decrease in wholesale energy prices, resulting in lower total expenditures on electricity or natural gas across a given grid. This paper reviews the existing knowledge and experience from select U.S. states regarding DRIPE (including New York and Ohio), and the potential for expanded application of the concept of DRIPE by regulators.

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.

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.

This report provides an overview of the current state of on-bill programs and provides actionable insights on key program design considerations for on-bill lending programs.

Over the past 30 years, program administrators have concentrated on investment behavior change -- that is getting their customers to install things like insulation and lighting systems using various behavior change tools such as marketing, education, rebates, and technical assistance to support the investment behavior change. Today, as program administrators move to expand the range of behavior change strategies in their portfolios, it is often difficult to know where to begin. The New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) began by detailing the range of behavior change strategies and identifying strategic opportunities.

This summary from a Better Buildings Residential Network peer exchange call focused on the performance of on-bill financing compared to other financing programs.

Links to residential projects completed under NYSERDA's Green Jobs-Green New York (GJGNY) program.

Links to case studies of residential projects and contractors under the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA)'s Home Performance with ENERGY STAR program.

This presentation provides an overview of PSE&G's Multifamily Housing Program, highlighting drivers, incentive structure, results, and lessons learned.

Presentation describing NYSERDA's alternative underwriting approach for its target market.

This policy brief describes how NYSERDA's Assisted Home Performance with ENERGY STAR Program increases access to financing through tiered underwriting criteria.

This peer exchange call summary focused on adapting and adjusting financing strategies after a program was implemented.

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

This report from Climate Solutions analyzes small- to medium-sized American cities that are using successful methods to further clean energy economic development. Better Buildings Neighborhood Program partners that are featured in the report include Bainbridge Island and Bremerton, Washington; Boulder, Colorado; Bedford, New York; Madison, Wisconsin; and Grand Rapids, Michigan. The report includes details on the how the featured cities funded their projects, found successful models to reach their goals, and to see which new projects are off to a promising start.

This report profiles the early results of a diverse range of small- to medium-sized American cities with different economic and energy profiles that are pioneering the clean energy economy. Many communities used federal grants to jumpstart long-term strategies to test and refine various clean energy and energy efficiency solutions. Others developed innovative financing strategies in the absence of grant money. These city-led efforts to catalyze local clean energy economic development are important to watch as federal grants sunset, especially in the absence of a comprehensive national energy or climate policy.

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 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 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.

Discusses innovative financing options designed to expand the accessibility of energy efficiency financing to households that typically do not qualify for traditional loans.

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.

Presentation providing an overview of the PAYS financial model, including information on risks and how to manage them, and successful program examples using the PAYS model.

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 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 is a sample request for proposals (RFP) from New York state for integrated marketing and communications support.

Two visual flow charts, one that illustrates the process starting with customer interest to final incentive payment, and another that illustrates the program's quality assurance process.

This report summarizes the issues and approaches involved in motivating customers to reduce the total energy they consume through energy prices and rate design.

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 describes the effects of utility spending on efficiency programs, how those effects could constitute barriers to investment in energy efficiency, and how policy mechanisms can reduce these barriers.

These case studies highlight examples of participating contractors who have employed Home Performance with ENERGY STAR to help homeowners improve their home's comfort and lower their utility bills.