States raise energy efficiency bar

Governors, state legislators, and state agencies across the nation are designating energy efficiency as the "first fuel" in the race for clean energy. Legislators are ramping up resource commitments, and utility commissions are pushing power providers harder than ever to increase efficiency investments. Recent state actions include:

• New York's Department of Public Service issued a preliminary plan to meet Governor Eliot Spitzer's target of reducing electricity usage in the state by 15 percent in 2015.

• North Carolina's legislature passed a bill in late summer to create a Renewable Portfolio Standard, in which energy efficiency can meet up to 40 percent of resource requirements.

• The Illinois legislature approved an Energy Efficiency Resource Standard this summer, requiring utilities to achieve energy savings as high as 2 percent of electricity sales. Important details, including program cost limits, are to be worked out.

• Minnesota lawmakers passed the New Generation Energy Act in 2007, which includes an EERS target reaching 1.5 percent of electricity sales—roughly the same as current load growth rates. Utility program, building codes and other approaches can be used to meet the resource requirement.

• The Iowa legislature's Energy Efficiency Study Committee held hearings this fall which may lead to a major increase in utility efficiency programs, already among the most effective in the Midwest.

• Texas lawmakers acted this year to double the state's EERS target, from 10 to 20 percent of load growth. A study was also commissioned to consider raising the target to as high as 50 percent of load growth.

• Virginia's State Corporation Commission held a stakeholder process in the summer of 2007, to get input for a report to the legislature on ways to meet the 10-percent utility energy savings target that was included in legislation passed in April.

• In Colorado, Xcel Energy responded to legislative, regulatory and gubernatorial initiatives with its Colorado Resource Plan. The Plan will double the current capacity of its customer programs to 694 megawatts, while tripling the amount of annual energy sales reductions to approximately 2,350 gigawatt-hours, by 2020.

These states, spread across the diverse regions, reflect a rising wave of efficiency policy commitments. The American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy estimates that EERS- savings targets set in 15 states could reduce total national electricity sales by as much as 0.8 percent per year by 2015—more than half the current national Annual Energy Outlook forecast, which projects annual load growth rates at 1.5 percent per year.

Source: ACEEE's Grapevine Online, 12/05/07.

Resources

• Xcel Energy
• American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy

Related articles

• Report, utilities find energy efficiency a major resource

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