Boulder County, Colorado, recently launched an interesting energy efficiency outreach program funded partially by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. The program involves door-to-door energy efficiency outreach every Saturday from November through April, during which time homes in the targeted area will get a free two-hour energy audit. The outreach workers, dubbed the “Energy Corps,” will install small efficiency upgrades such as compact fluorescent light bulbs, low-flow showerheads, programmable thermostats, weather stripping and clotheslines. They will also check household appliances and make adjustments to those items as necessary to improve efficiency (Source: DailyCamera.com, 10/18/09).Homeowners associations within the county can apply on behalf of their tenants and will work
with county officials to sign up the willing households for the upgrades. If the program is deemed successful, the county will actively seek new sources of funding to continue it past the current deadline of April. In addition to county efforts, the City of Boulder is implementing its own door-to-door program that assesses larger-scale energy upgrade needs, arranges for financing, and schedules the projects for home owners.On October 19, the US Department of Energy released a Recovery Through Retrofit report stating that energy efficiency retrofitting on existing homes could reduce energy waste by 40%, and that these changes alone could “…cut energy bills by $21 billion and reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 160 million metric tons every year” (Source EnergyEfficiencyNews.com, October 21). With this in mind, proactive programs like the one Boulder County is piloting could be a tremendously positive force in the United States’ drive to reduce energy consumption and carbon emissions levels as rapidly as possible. For more information about the Recovery Through Retrofit report and its full list of recommendations, please click here.
Similar programs to those seen in Boulder are rolling out nationwide as a part of the Energy Efficiency and Conservation Block Grant Program, which has earmarked more than $2.7 billion in grants available to cities, counties, tribes and SEOs and has granted more than $1.4 billion in funding already (Source: EECBG.energy.gov). To see a full listing of recipients, please click here.
surveyed state-implemented energy efficiency programs (using data from 2007) and found that, “… it costs an average of 2.5 cents to save a kilowatt hour of electricity through the programs” (Source: WSJ.com, October 22). In contrast, according to the same study, building new energy plants results in a cost-per-kilowatt-hour of nearly three-times that rate. 
Beyond the government-driven initiatives are growing efforts by utilities to reduce energy consumption. These customer initiatives range from free high-efficiency light bulbs to tiered pricing based on total energy consumption. In many states, comprehensive partnerships are forming to align the efforts of both government and utility programs toward a shared set of overall goals. One example of this type of partnership can be found in the Colorado Public Utilities Commission's recent Energy Efficiency Status Report. For a state scorecard on Utility-based energy efficiency programs provided by the ACEEE, please click here.
Last, on the local effort level and though it’s hardly news, each state continues to offer energy efficiency upgrades and weatherization efforts for low-income residents as a part of a series of US Department of Energy weatherization and low-income energy programs (Source: EERE.energy.gov).
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