Support is growing for federal legislation that would incentivize energy efficiency throughout the country in much the same way that a Renewable Energy Standard (RES) would increase the production of renewably sourced electricity.
Last month Representative Edward Markey (D-MA) introduced H.R. 889, the Save American Energy Act, to establish an Energy Efficiency Resource Standard (EERS) that, like an RES, would set a percentage requirement for utility companies.
Under the proposed EERS retail electricity distributors would be required to attain 15% electricity savings while natural gas distributors would need to meet an 10% savings target by 2020.
The percentage of energy savings would be relative to average sales in the prior 2 years, and distributors could obtain energy savings in a variety of ways, including by helping end-use customers save energy, by improving energy efficiency in their own distribution systems, or through the use of contracts to purchase energy savings from other utilities or third-party efficiency service providers.
The American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE), which has given its support to H.R. 889, determined that the cost of efficiency improvements would be $0.03 per kilowatt-hour saved, which is significanctly less expensive than building new plants and power lines and burning more fuel.
Currently, new conventional base-load production sources generate electricity at a rate between $0.073 and $0.135 per kilowatt-hour.
Numerous corporations and organizations have announced their support for the proposed EERS, including Johnson Controls, Ceres, Whirlpool, Sierra Club and the Digital Energy Solutions Campaign, which includes AT&T, Dell, HP, Microsoft, Sony, Sun Microsystems and Verizon.
Texas became the first state to establish an EERS in 1999, requiring electric utilities to offset 10% of load growth through end-use energy efficiency. After several years of meeting this goal at low costs, in 2007 the legislature increased the standard to 15% of load growth by 2009, 20% of load growth by 2010 and directed that higher targets be investigated. A recent report commissioned by the PUCT found that raising the goal to 50% of load growth is feasible.
Other states with efficiency mandates or programs include Vermont, California, Hawaii, Connecticut and Nevada.
Learn more about EERS at the link below.
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Rather than set requirements for companies, it would be far better to simply publish information about these companies that journalists and the public could rely upon.
I’m sure most utility companies could do without bad publicity regarding their efficiency.
Sometimes just shining the flashlight gets the cockroaches running and helps along the decision to start cleaning things up!