The first LEED for Existing Buildings Gold Certification is awarded in Georgia, which REP has the best customer service in Texas, which company is moving away from coal-fired power plants, and a new Energy Innovation Hub to be built at Penn State.

PepsiCo’s Frito-Lay facility in Perry, Georgia has become the first building to be awarded the LEED for Existing Buildings Gold Certification in Georgia. The LEED program, which is run by the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) helps homeowners and businesses improve their design, construction and operation of buildings so that they can be greener. PepsiCo’s Frito-Lay Perry facility has added waste heat recovery boilers, improved maintenance systems and upgraded oven burners. These retrofits have helped account for a 35% reduction in natural gas consumption and a 72% reduction in electricity use per pound of product. The LEED for Existing Buildings Gold Certification is the 4th that Frito-Lay North America has received. One is located at their corporate headquarters in Plano, Texas, while the other 2 are manufacturing plants that are in Casa Grande, Arizona and Topeka, Kansas.

JD Power and Associates has ranked Champion Energy Services number one for highest customer satisfaction among retail electric providers in Texas. This is the third year that the study has been conducted, which scores a REP’s ability out of a 1,000 point scale to effectively provide pricing, billing and payment, communications and customer service. Champion Energy which received a score of 737, currently services 450,000 residential customers in Texas, Illinois, Pennsylvania, and Ohio and is expected to open for business in New Jersey and California by the end of the year. According to the Public Utility Commission of Texas, about 51% of 5.6 million eligible Texas residential customers purchase power from a retail electric provider that’s not the incumbent in their market. Champion Energy

The Tennessee Valley Authority, has decided to make idle nine coal-fired electric generating units, totaling about 1,000 megawatts, at three of its power plants, in 2011. While some of the units, which are located in Kentucky, Tennessee, and Alabama will stay idle for years, others will potentially be converted to biomass fuel while some natural gas generators are being built at other plants. The TVA is trying to achieve its goal of significantly lowering its carbon emissions by 2020.

The Department of Energy has awarded Penn State University $122 million to set up a Regional Innovation Hub that will research ways to make buildings more energy efficient. The new facility will be built over the next 5 years at the Navy Yard Clean Energy campus in Philadelphia. This Energy Innovation Hub is the third Hub to receive this kind of award. The Department awarded an Oak Ridge National Labs team to build a Hub that will research, model and simulate work on nuclear reactors and another group at Cal Tech is building an Innovation Hub that’s focused on researching fuels from sunlight. The development of the Penn State Innovation Hub is important because buildings account for nearly 40 percent of our country’s energy consumption and carbon emissions.

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