Energy Efficiency Sounds So Good, But Where Are the Incentives To Make It Happen?

Here’s an article that illustrates a principle I often discuss here: the lack of proper incentives and regulation to get the power utilities to embrace energy efficiency.  As a society, we need to use less energy, but that will only happen when all the stakeholders are rewarded by making it so.

As SmartGridNews ace Jesse Berst notes:  “Although utilities are often mandated to encourage energy efficiency, they rarely receive incentives. Now Portland, OR-based Energy Resource Management is pioneering a new financial structure that, if it doesn’t reward utilities, at least doesn’t penalize them.”

At the end of the day, we need to completely uproot our relationship with the utilities and re-establish one that contemplates all the things we now realize we need:

• incentives to use less energy

• integration of renewables into the grid-mix, with investments in smart grid, energy storage, etc.

• elimination of the dirtiest forms of energy, i.e., coal

• distributed generation

Let’s make it happen.