Ben Taube is the Executive Director of the Southeast Energy Efficiency Alliance (SEEA). SEEA has received $20 million from the Federal Government to work with cities on energy efficiency projects. We speak with Ben about getting funding for energy efficiency projects and where Ben thinks the state of the energy industry is going.

Full Transcript:

Ben Taube: Yeah, the Southeast Energy Efficiency Alliance is a regional nonprofit focused across the  eleven southeast states and the Southeast. We basically cover Virginia, all the way to Florida, Kentucky, at our northern tier, Arkansas, Louisiana, and everything else in between. We’re founded upon a principle of deploying energy efficiency across the southern states, and that takes a variety of different ways to be looked at. One is we a lot of state policy work, helping out states, forming policies for our states to adopt but really providing the kind for states to take leadership roles. We work with our utilities on efficiency programs. We work with our public service commissions on regulatory components. We work with the private sector on technology deployment and strategies for getting efficiency technology into the market. We do a lot of research with universities, and we partner with the universities across the Southeast. We also have a very active program in industrial efficiency, working with manufacturers. And then finally we work with governments. That’s both state and local governments, in really helping governments figure out what their role is. Obviously, with governments, we received quite a bit of money from the federal government for the stimulus programs. We’ve been very active in planning programs in what states should do, what cities should do. And then we do education. And our education contains a variety of different components. You know, it’s usually business-to-business, business-to-government. And we are publicly and privately funded. So we work with corporations through an associate membership structure. We have federal support from agencies. Then we have private foundation support.

Q: Which states are the most energy efficient? What types of steps do these states take to be an energy efficiency leader in the Southeast?

Ben Taube: It’s a good question because we get it a lot. And there’s lots of ways to answer this question. You know, we can look at different structures and say, “If you just look at utilities, who’s the best performing state. Or if you look at just policies, who’s got the best policies?” But taking away that and just saying, “Who are shining states out there? Who’s really embracing efficiency from a variety of different levels?” You know, the most rising state as of last year in the region is Tennessee. And Tennessee has really adopted a comprehensive look at energy efficiency, and that’s been through the leadership of Governor Bredesen. I mean, he’s really been a champion behind this. But beyond that, North Carolina has typically been the most progressive state. They’ve got the policy structure in place. They’ve got the utility side which is really thinking about how they deploy energy efficiency. They have a lot of research and development happening, obviously in the state, and they’ve been very active. But, you know, all of our states have something going on, and regardless, if it’s a program at one state or utility involvement at another state or it’s simply just investment into R&D. We’ve got a lot of things happening. And I foresee we’re going to have more states showing more leadership in the next year or so.

Q: What kind of research does your organization work on? What kinds of recommendations does the “Energy Efficiency in the Southeast” make?

Ben Taube: Most of our research for the region has been looking at energy efficiency potential and that’s both looking at the technical potential of what can be deployed, what technologies are going to be deployed and what are the policies in it. And, secondly, what’s the economic impact? What are we going to create if we adopt policy. So let’s take, for example, if we were to create policies around third-party verification of building codes at a commercial-residential level. What do you need to do that? What’s the planning horizon? What’s the cost associated with it? What’s the energy reduction also associated with it? And so we’ll look across scales. We’ll look at residential. We’ll look at commercial. We’ll look at industrial. We’ll look at transportation and come up with a variety of policies and say, “If we had sweeter policies, each state could achieve X reductions of energy. And not only that, but you could produce X amount of jobs and the economic tax impact to your state would be the following.” So that research we’ve been doing for the last couple of years. We’ve just completed a report looking at the entire Southeast, every single state with Georgia Tech and with Duke University, and that report is now available on our website. It shows exactly how we could reduce energy consumption and demand across the southern states. And, in fact, it’s pretty bold. It talks about how we could actually curtail the need for new demands through plan, new plans but actually by embracing very aggressive energy efficiency. So we’ve got some really cutting-edge research out there that has widespread implications. So a couple things, as I just mentioned, perhaps it’s a residential energy efficiency retro-fit program on the resale of a home. So if you resale your home, you have to retrofit to some standard or Energy Start standard, or something beyond. That’s a policy we looked at. If you looked at the industrial sector, it might be some type of industrial incentive for combined heat and power programs. So they’re actually producing, taking waste heat and producing energy onsite. At the commercial level, you know, it’s an aggressive retro commissioning activity where they actually go and tune up commercial buildings so they perform. So we look at a variety of different policies. There’s other things included. Appliance standards. Just the way that we have appliance, what we could set at the state level on how appliances are sold. The efficiency component needs to be included into that in each of those appliances. So we look at a suite of policies. As I said, it could be a residential scale, it could be commercial scale, it could be industrial, and underneath that there’s a variety of different avenues to look at. So, you know, we have a roadmap. We have a game plan that if we were to seek to achieve it, which I think we will, we’ve got to work on a implementation  now, then we can really see energy efficiency grow as a business. Our states prosper from economic development potential and, you know, providing good policy.

Q: What role does SEEA take to make sure that these projects are infused with the right amount of capital?

Ben Taube: So part of that answer is that, you know, we as an organization see ourselves in a role of market transformation. And so really how do we transform a market? And so as I mentioned early on about the programs we do, we kind of look at all those components whether it’s policy or it’s a programmatic decision at the utility level or it’s a technology deployment strategy. I mean, these are the components that we have to drive through the economic viability of the efficiency market. Now we’ve got to help build the efficiency market as well. I don’t know that we have the infrastructure, if we look across the country that others would have seen in terms of how much is being deployed. But, you know, I think that if we had the right policies in place and the right incentives in place, that infrastructure would become developed.

Q: What projects or initiatives are other areas of the country working on that you see as potential projects for SEEA and how do energy prices dictate which projects are approved?

Ben Taube: There are lots of strong policy decisions that could be made at that level. So it could looking at the supply of electricity and how that efficiency meets in that supply. Or there could be, you know, targets that states set for how much efficiency has to be met in the state. I mean, if you look at the California market, you look at the East Coast market and yet you say, “Why has it been so aggressive?” Well, first rates are way too much higher. So the return of investment of technology implementation is more palatable. But also there’s been a lot of regulatory oversight saying, “We want efficiency in our marketplace. We’re going to incentivize emerging cutting-edge technology. Efficiency’s going to compete in the market.” So we’ve got those components that we have to look at. I actually think, good or bad rates, we’re not going to we’re not going to stay consistently low. The cost of energy is simply increasing as we know. We buy gas everyday. We look at the natural gas prices. We see coal risings. We see nuclear prices rising. The cost of electricity, the compliant side of electricity is certainly increasing. One thing we do know is energy efficiency is pretty consistent. We know we can change lights. We know we can put insulation in. We know it’s relatively inexpensive. So, you know, it is something that we have to embrace. And we know that’s very affordable, and it pays back immediately once you’ve installed it.

Q: SEEA was recently given funding by the Federal Government for partnering with cities in the Southeast to do energy efficiency projects. Can you tell us about this?

Ben Taube: We’re a recipient of $20 million to work with cities across the Southeast. In a very aggressive pool of applicants, so we feel very lucky to have gotten that. Our proposal that was funded actually works with thirty cities across the Southeast including the Virgin Islands on structured energy efficiency programs. So we’re going to be working with every city on planning of how they will create financial mechanisms, how they create the service sector, how they measure and verify, how they communicate. So we’re looking across a variety of platforms on how we’re going to engage cities and develop the infrastructure they need and partnerships in the end on the private side and make a market work in the southern states. It’s quite exciting for us. When we put the proposal together in December, kind of backtracking back into October, November, we’ve been actively working hard the last couple of years. And so we were approached and approached cities across the region, talking about how we can do a regional application. And so the cities have been already selected. There, perhaps, could be the potential that we can  add more, but we’ve got a bit of, some work ahead of us to revise our proposal and to really work on how we may implement it. Easy question, hard answer. We hope it’s early summer that money will start actually moving into the cities.

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