The OurEnergyLibrary aggregates and indexes publicly available fact sheets, journal articles, reports, studies, and other publications on U.S. energy topics. It is updated every week to include the most recent energy resources from academia, government, industry, non-profits, think tanks, and trade associations. Suggest a resource by emailing us at info@ourenergypolicy.org.
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This brief presents the most comprehensive estimates to date of the full cost of saving electricity through efficiency programs funded by customers of investor-owned utilities.1,2 The total cost of the electricity efficiency resource includes the investment by both the program administrator and program participants in saving a kilowatt-hour (kWh). It is a valuable metric that resource planners, regulators and stakeholders can use to assess and compare the relative costs among efficiency programs and between efficiency and energy supply investments.
A previous report (Billingsley et al. 2014) drew upon the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) Demand-Side Management (DSM) Program Database3 to …
View Full ResourceBuilding energy use accounted for 38 percent of total US carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions in 2012, and roughly half of those emissions were attributable to the commercial building sector. A new policy that has been adopted in 10 US cities and one US county is a requirement that commercial and sometimes also multifamily residential building owners disclose their annual energy use and benchmark it relative to other buildings. We discuss these nascent policies, preliminary analyses of the data that have been collected so far, and how to evaluate whether they are having an effect on energy use and CO2 emissions. …
View Full ResourceEfficient access to capital from secondary markets—reselling energy loans to investors to replenish program funds—is being advanced as an important enabler of the energy efficiency industry “at scale.” However, the role that secondary markets can play in bringing energy efficiency to scale is largely untested. Only a handful of secondary market transactions of energy efficiency loan products have been executed to date, and it is too soon to draw robust conclusions from these deals. At the same time, energy efficiency program administrators and policymakers face near-term decisions on whether and how to access secondary markets as part of their energy …
View Full ResourceThis fact sheet focuses on employment in the renewable energy and energy efficiency sectors in the United States and around the world. The job figures cited below are sourced from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and the Bureau of Labor Statics (BLS), as well as international organizations, national non-profits, think tanks and national trade associations.…
View Full ResourceThis year residences and businesses in the United States will spend an estimated $360 billion to meet our total electricity demands – to cool and light our homes, listen to music or watch television, and power our commercial and industrial equipment. Electricity purchases will further enable our access to the Internet and will filter and purify the water that is delivered to our homes, schools, and businesses each and every day.
Although we will derive many important benefits as we pay our monthly electricity bills, the current electricity generation infrastructure annually produces 3.34 million tons of sulfur dioxide. (SO2) and …
View Full ResourceThe release of EPA’s much anticipated Clean Power Plan proposal starts the clock on what will be a multiyear process of review, analysis, planning, and implementation for states, affected sources, and other stakeholders. This white paper takes a novel, nationwide approach to estimating an overall impact on emissions and cost. It sheds light on the role that energy efficiency can play as a compliance mechanism.…
View Full ResourceLighting, Electricity, Steel: Energy Efficiency Backfire in Emerging Economies presents three historical case studies of when energy efficiency rebound occurred: lighting from 1700 to present, electricity generation in 20th century America, and iron and steel production from 1900 onward.…
View Full ResourceWhat do we know about the size of the rebound effect? Should we believe claims that energy efficiency improvements lead to an increase in energy use? This paper clarifies what the rebound effect is, and provides a guide for economists and policymakers interested in its magnitude. We describe how some papers in the literature consider the rebound effect from a costless exogenous increase in energy efficiency, while others examine the effects of a particular energy efficiency policy—a distinction that leads to very different welfare and policy implications. We present the most reliable evidence available quantifying the energy efficiency rebound, and …
View Full ResourceEnergy-related research and development (R&D)—on coal-based synthetic petroleum and on atomic power—played an important role in the successful outcome of World War II. In the post- war era, the federal government conducted R&D on fossil fuel and nuclear energy sources to support peacetime economic growth. The energy crises of the 1970s spurred the government to broaden the focus to include renewable energy and energy efficiency. Over the 37-year period from the Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) inception at the beginning of fiscal year (FY) 1978 through FY2014, federal funding for renewable energy R&D amounted to about 17% of the energy R&D …
View Full ResourceA flexible nation-wide energy efficiency registry would enable and expand energy efficiency measures that could be used for compliance with the CPP by increasing transparency and using a consistent framework to track and report projected and realized energy savings. In this paper we expand on the benefits outlined above and recommend a consensus-based stakeholder approach to develop an energy efficiency registry. Key issues that the registry would need to address are explored and a phased implementation plan is outlined that would incorporate broad stakeholder input, help states meet compliance deadlines, and evolve with the implementation of the regulation itself.…
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