Helping Communities Develop Through Efficiency & Renewables

Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI), the world’s leading expert on energy efficiency, is launching a web-based tool to help communities understand how energy efficiency and renewable energy can be an integral part of economic development.

The most common way of creating jobs and a tax base for cities and towns is to attract industry. Towns usually offer tax breaks or free infrastructure to new industries or retail developers. These then compete with existing businesses, gobble up land, and increase infrastructure costs. After paying the costs of growth, the community may be worse off than when it started.

Michael Kinsley, of RMIs Research & Consulting team, says, Most simply dont know there are business development and job creation opportunities in energy efficiency and renewable energy. RMI’s new website, the Community Energy Opportunity Finder, is designed to help communities discover those opportunities.

We know that efficiency and renewables work, both through logic and by the examples of such cities as Sacramento, Kinsley continues. Sacramento voters told the municipal utility company to shut down a poorly performing nuclear electric generation plant after costly repairs failed. The utility responded by helping customers use energy more efficiently, which avoided the need for new power. It also had this amazing unanticipated side effect: it created 880 new jobs and increased regional income by $124 million. And thats before counting the benefits of making power generation more diversified and renewable.

But the people who understand energy efficiency and renewable energy sources and those who work in economic development and business improvement seldom come into contact with each other. That missed communication causes missed opportunities.

I began to wonder if there were a way that community leaders could be made aware of these huge opportunities without hiring an expensive consultant, Kinsley said. Hence, the idea of an interactive website that would calculate a communitys energy savings potential.

Users will enter basic physical and energy information about their community. The Finder lets users create and save multiple scenarios based on different economic assumptions. The Finder then performs a series of calculations and displays potential dollar savings, emissions reductions, and jobs gained from energy efficiency programs.

The tool is intended to be the equivalent of an energy consultants preliminary analysis, Kinsley said, helping to frame energy efficiency and renewables for influential community leaders. We wanted to create an even playing field, so energy efficiency and renewables can compete with other opportunities for economic development, he says.

Energy efficiency works as an economic development engine in two ways:

* It requires investment in devices and equipmentefficient motors, efficient lights, and the labor required, for example, to insulate homes and businessessupporting local payrolls.

* Energy efficiency reduces utility bills for residences and businesses, freeing up money for local spending while improving quality of life. Most of this money stays in the community and may turn over several times.

Communities often try to solve economic problems with expansion, which doesnt usually have widely distributed benefits: a new stadium or subdivision may benefit relatively few constituents, and seldom those truly in need. This type of development, too, may cause such secondary problems as increased traffic and infrastructure costs.

In contrast, Kinsley said, development via energy efficiency or renewable energy provides benefits distributed widely among the communitys citizens, especially those in need. And when cashflow is freed up for such basic necessities as heat and light, additional wealth is created community-wide.

The Finder: [sorry this link is no longer available] –if it’s not live now it will be this month.