From 2GreenEnergy Intern Louis de Saint Phalle: Shaheen-Portman: A Missed Opportunity in Energy Efficiency

If you’ve been following the recent energy efficiency news, maybe you’ve heard about the Shaheen-Portman bill that got “killed” in the senate one month ago. Also known as the Energy Savings and Industrial Competitiveness Act, it has been re-introduced several times with persistence and with bipartisan support.  It planned to create 200,000 jobs, save approximately $16.2 billion annually, and drastically reduce carbon emissions in the United States.

I always hear that energy efficiency is the “low hanging fruit”; then why are we unable to pass a bill like this?

All of this has been rather messy. There has also been some controversy as some parts of the bill would repeal existing statutes, such as parts of the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2007. Furthermore, the bill has been used as a bargaining tool by the Obama administration in the approval of the Keystone XL pipeline, although to no avail.

Last week, I attended a congressional hearing on energy efficiency during which they mentioned that some parts of the law were coming up to a vote in the near future as independent bills. I thought it might be a good opportunity to discuss what the bill attempted to accomplish and how these standalone bills might help our national energy use.

The act introduced three primary provisions, dealing with each of the following aspects in the following way:

-Buildings: new building efficiency standards would be enforced with an emphasis on transparency. The bill would leverage private sector investment and focus on job creation. Commercial buildings would get an opportunity to increase energy efficiency through the Energy Efficiency Financing Initiative.

-Federal government: the bill would impose energy saving mandates on federal agencies. It would allow Energy Service Companies (ESCOs) to be used to promote vehicles and charging stations for cars running on electricity or natural gas.

-Manufacturing: the Department of Energy would launch new research and development for the industrial applications of energy efficiency. The supply star program would also be introduced.

Zoom in: Supply Star Program

The program aims to promote practices in efficiency and recognize those companies and products that use highly efficient supply chains. Data from supply chains would also be aggregated for the further assessment of supply chain energy considerations. Finally, it would be quite synergistic with the already existing Energy Star program introduced in 1992 which deals with efficiency for homes and commercial buildings (among others).

The standalone bills are coming up. The Better Buildings Standards Act, modification on the Energy Efficiency Government Tech Act, and more: I will definitely keep an eye on them.