Daily Score Blog

I don’t own a single family home, but if I did, I’d probably be hunting for efficiency programs. The good news for homeowners: there are lots of programs and there’s lots of money on the table. The bad news: the number of options and incentives is somewhat bewildering.

There are many things to take issue with in Knute Berger’s recent piece in Crosscut about smart growth and sprawl.  

But let’s pick two things. 

“It’s about to be raining money.”

That’s how Terry Oliver of the Bonneville Power Administration described the federal economic stimulus’ clean-energy provisions. He was speaking earlier this month to nearly 1,000 people from the growing clean-energy business in a packed Seattle conference hall. (You can actually watch him say this—praise be to the YouTube impulse—along with everything else that any plenary speaker said on this state website.) The turnout—possibly the largest for a conference on energy efficiency and renewables in Cascadian history—was largely a testament to how widely held that sentiment was.

(Undiscliplined aside: The spectacle of hundreds of swarming clean-energy enthusiasts reminded me of the punch line about how to herd cats: you move the food. They clearly smelled food—er, money—in that conference hall. [Second undisciplined aside: The smell of food is not the premise of my favorite cat-herding video.] And, all irony aside, the fact that clean energy now smells like money is exceptionally good news, because nothing mobilizes human enterprise like the confluence of enthusiasm and profit-seeking.)

The whole US federal stimulus—almost $800 billion total, $78 billion of it for clean-energy nationwide, as much as $2.9 billion just for clean-energy projects in the state of Washington alone in the next two years, with as much as another $2 billion in Oregon and Idaho—is also a paltry sum when set beside the enormity of the challenge we face. The Cascadian energy economy drained more than $28 billion from the economies of the Northwest states last year alone.

This chart shows that Idaho, Oregon, and Washington together commonly see changes in energy spending far in excess of the (up to) $2.5 billion per year that the stimulus is injecting. From 2007 to 2008, for example, spiking fossil-fuel prices increased the burden on our regional economy by $6 billion—more than twice the annual value of the federal stimulus.

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