Daily Score Blog

Someone recently said “energy efficiencies aren’t low hanging fruit, they are the fruit lying on the ground.” Then why don’t people retrofit their homes? There are a lot of reasons, but one of them is finding the money to pay for efficiencies up front. While innovative financing tools (like my favorite bond financing) can help, they are only part of the solution.

An article in the New York Times this week called “A Stimulus That Could Save Money” traverses a well worn path in the discussion of energy efficiencies, asking the question “what will make people retrofit their homes?” The article doesn’t have any shockingly new ideas, but the discussion does surface the concept of Property Assessed Clean Energy financing—or  PACE. 

Now, sidestepping for a moment the obvious answer, “you can sell the energy efficient home for more money,” PACE is an interesting way of paying for the retrofits as part of regular property taxes. This is another version of “on bill” financing that puts the payments back on the owner’s property tax bill rather than on their utility bill.

Eureka! I have discovered a huge new source of clean energy in Alaska that can create green jobs too. Well sort of.

I’m not the first to strike gold, but lately I’ve been describing the potential of energy efficiency like hitting the jackpot. Efficiency is a clean, domestic energy source that would add, in the next decade, $1.2 trillion dollars to the economy. The big numbers (like saving 9.1 Quadrillion BTUs in Two Minutes) get people’s attention. If the kind of economic impact we could gain from energy efficiencies was a natural resource buried in the ground, you can bet that every level of government would be trying to dig them up.

Last Saturday, two stories about green jobs caught my eye. One was in the Washington Post and the other in the Seattle Times.  The Post article was a hand-wringing affair about the failure of energy efficiency efforts funded by stimulus dollars to create any of the promised green jobs. The Times article was a bit more positive, reporting about a training program I wrote about in a post titled Labor Sees Green Job Opportunity. The Times piece highlighted the first graduates of the program, created by the Laborers' International Union of North America (LiUNA) to train weatherization workers. But the Times piece also asked the crucial question of one of the graduates, “will you be able to get a job?”

The graduate, Ahmalik Claiborne, answered, "I'm sure I can get a job . . . We are at the start of something good." Not everyone is so optimistic. But it is important for our region’s problem solvers not to give in to pessimism. The fact is, our region is ahead of the rest of the country and getting green jobs right is better than getting them right now.

Over the last week there has been quite a bit of discussion in the media about the number of jobs created by stimulus dollars. Some argue the money is being wasted and others that the amount of money allocated were never enough in the first place. Paul Krugman suggested that “the really bad news is that “centrists” in Congress aren’t able or willing to draw the obvious conclusion, which is that we need a lot more federal spending on job creation.”

Either way, as I wrote in a post called Color of Money, a lot of money has been allocated and has yet to be spent. The facts seem to agree that moving funds (and allocations for bond and tax credit programs) out to local governments and into broader circulation is taking a long time.

But, when it comes to energy efficiency in general and stimulus funding in specific, the Northwest is getting high ratings. In their 2009 state ranking of local implementation of energy efficiency programs, the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE) ranks Oregon 3rd and Washington 7th among the top ten states for implementing energy efficiency policies.

Early this week, President Obama gave a speech touting the $3.4 billion in grants the federal government has awarded to local companies, utilities and cities working to improve the country’s aging and outmoded electric energy grid. The awards will support “smart grid” technology that enables easier and more effective transmission of electricity from one region to another. One of the recipients is Pacific Northwest Generating Cooperative (PNGC), a Portland-based electric generation and transmission cooperative owned by 16 Northwest electric utilities. The grant will fund installation of “95,000 smart meters, substation equipment, and load management devices that will integrate electric cooperatives across four states using a central data collection software system hosted by PNGC.”

But will all the smart grid money create green collar jobs?

Unfortunately—and surprisingly considering unemployment rates—according to a recent report by the National Commission on Energy Policy, smart-grid investment will require trained workers who aren’t yet available in large numbers.

A study released over the summer found that there are some great opportunities in Washington state for green jobs in the renewable energy sector. But it also pointed to some problems ensuring adequate training for those jobs.

The study confirms what Professor W. Norton Grubb found: work force training needs to be better integrated with education. Training is about learning tasks or work related skills that allow immediate employment while education is grounded in more broadly applicable skills like reading, writing and organizational skills.

The education training dichotomy is one aspect of the fragmentation that plagues work force training and by extension training for green collar jobs. Grubb’s ideas, creating better connections between education and training, are still relevant today more than a decade after he wrote about them in his book Learning to Work.

Tugboats are in a strange position in the marketplace:  there are enough of them out there to suck down a fair amount of fuel in port cities, and to cause some medium-sized problems for local air quality.  But there aren’t quite enough of them for manufacturers to build engines specially designed for tugs’ needs. 

So tugboat manufacturers typically outfit their ships with maritime versions of locomotive engines:  hulking machines with enough power to pull big loads.  A good-sized harbor tug has two of these massive engines running, along with an auxiliary motor or two to provide power for on-board equipment, even when it’s just tooling around the harbor at the pace of a brisk walk.  Unfortunately, locomotive engines are pretty darn inefficient at slow speeds and light loads—which is precisely how harbor tugs run most of the time. Tugboats wind up wasting a lot of fuel as a result, which boosts their climate-warming emissions while hurting the tugboat operators’ bottom lines.

Enter Foss Maritime. The storied, Seattle-based marine transportation company has figured out a way to adapt off-the-shelf engine and battery technology to create a cleaner, fuel-saving hybrid tug.  The company’s still waiting for data from its lone hybrid--which was constructed in their Rainier, OR shipyard, and is now stationed in L.A./Long Beach--but expects that the hybrid technology will save the company a bundle on fuel.

Very few of the stimulus dollars allocated for energy efficiency -- and the green jobs they can create -- have been allocated or spent by governments. At first this might seem a bit discouraging. Lots of money allocated but caught up in the bureaucracy of federal, state, and local governments. However, a look at green stimulus funding in the Northwest is more encouraging, with some cities and local agencies starting their work off on the right foot. 

A recent report by London-based New Energy Finance has found that less than 10 percent of green stimulus money allocated worldwide has actually been spent by governments this year. That’s about $177 billion spent so far on supporting energy efficiencies, renewable energy and green jobs out of more than a trillion available. (The report found that the United States government has spent about 12 percent of its stimulus allocation thus far or about $7.92 billion dollars.)

Seattle always ranks high on lists of US cities with green buildings, with more than 80 large buildings and nearly 50 homes now certified by the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design program. Since the city began mandating green construction practices in its own buildings a decade ago, the techniques have spread to offices, condos, single family homes, educational centers, even clean-and-sober low-income housing.

Take the Hyatt at Olive 8, which will be hosting our lucky sweepstakes winner for two luxurious nights. It’s the first LEED-certified hotel in the city, with everything from low-flow showerheads to preferred parking spaces for fuel-efficient cars to spa treatments that feature locally-grown ingredients. It’s expected to use 23 percent less energy than a comparable conventional building, and 36 percent less water. Plus, it walked the anti-sprawl walk: by purchasing development rights that allowed it to build higher in the city, the project also helped preserve open space on Sugarloaf Mountain in rural King County.

Here are some other green building projects to check out while you're in town:

It caught my attention when I heard State Treasurer Jim McIntire saying he won’t be supporting I-1033 because he is concerned that if it passes, it could hurt Washington State’s bond rating, increasing costs for the state to borrow money.

My dad has an annoying saying about borrowing and debt: “Neither a borrower or a lender be.” The quote is from Shakespeare’s Hamlet and is given as sage advice by another father, Polonius to his son Laertes. I’ve never liked the quote because I have always been a fan of the creative use of public financing options, especially bonds. I wrote about Qualified Energy Efficiency Bonds (QECBs) and a proposal in Washington’s last legislative session as great opportunities to use public financing, or public debt, as a tool to create large scale energy efficiencies for cities and schools.

Editor's note: The following is a profile from Sightline's green-collar jobs primer. Read more about what makes a green-collar job and how we can create more in the Northwest.

Before Greg Jordan graduated with a degree in environmental sciences from Portland State University, he imagined he might find a job working in stormwater control or restoring wetlands.

Instead, he spent his summer on a weatherization crew doing hands-on labor—slithering through crawl spaces, blowing insulation into wall cavities, sealing up air leaks—and loving it.

Out of a dozen program graduates, he’s only one of two who were able to quickly land a job in a tough economy. It wouldn’t have happened, he said, without a renewed attention and commitment to energy efficiency.

“Without the stimulus and the funding, I don’t think I would have been given this chance,” said Jordan. “The field is really just getting going. It’s been around, but finally people are realizing these little things make a big difference.”

He answered an ad placed by EcoTech LLC, an environmental services company with a background in pollution cleanup. It launched a new a business line in October 2008 in energy efficiency and weatherization.

As I have been researching energy efficiency something has bothered me about energy and poverty data. I wanted to see actual income numbers next to energy use, kind of the way we would look at prevalence rates in public health. That would help me wrap my head around the connections between climate policy and fairness. I want to be able to say something like “people who earn less than $15,000 a year pay x percent of their income in energy costs while those who earn more than $50,000 pay much less than x percent.”

I did find a chart on the Department of Energy website that indicated that the average family pays 5 percent of its income in energy costs while low income families pay 16 percent. Pretty good information; but I wanted more. The chart was based on the Residential Energy Consumption Survey (RECS) from 2001. So I looked behind the chart and found data from the most recent survey in 2005.

Here is a snapshot.

Today, Sightline released a primer on green jobs called Green-Collar Jobs: Realizing the Promise. Green jobs have been a much-discussed topic here and elsewhere. But what are they? Who has them? And how do we get more for Northwest workers?

A follow up to our popular Cap and Trade 101, Sightline's new primer explains what makes a green job, how investment in clean energy creates those jobs, and how Northwest leaders can build a green-collar workforce in our region.

Included in the primer:

Green-collar jobs are those held by employees who devote a substantial share of their work hours to activities that boost energy efficiency, increase the supply of renewable energy, or prevent, reduce, or clean up pollution.

The Promise

Green jobs can speed progress on three important challenges at once: economic recovery, job creation, and climate change. This is an enormous opportunity to ease our dependence on climate-warming fossil fuels while fostering lasting, broadly shared economic prosperity for local families.

The Plan

The biggest chance in the near term for green-collar job creation is in boosting energy efficiency in buildings. This is local work that saves energy. These are jobs that cannot be outsourced. Focusing on training programs for workers that lead to credentials or certifications and factoring training, employment, and formal education into career ladders will help grow a green-collar workforce that gets Northwest families on a track to prosperity in the clean energy economy.

Combining work training programs in fields like efficiency retrofitting or renewable energy with innovative financing programs will supply the workers, stoke demand, and secure funding for the green-collar economy--right here in our communities.

The Prize

Applying a comprehensive set of solutions can help the Northwest lead a green-collar economic recovery. Success won't be fully captured in higher quarterly earnings or a lower unemployment rate; it will be measured by whether the Northwest increasingly offers its residents a more sustainable way to live, with greater energy independence, fewer greenhouse-gas emissions, cozier buildings with lower operating costs, and good-paying jobs that provide paychecks with a purpose for local families.

Read more about the green jobs primer; check out profiles of northwesterners joining the green workforce; or DOWNLOAD the primer now.

This Saturday, I will be speaking about energy efficiencies at the annual Wild Idaho North! Conference. Preparing for this presentation has given me a chance to zero in on the true potential of efficiencies for buildings and homes. I also used a recent gathering of Sightline supporters to help focus my thoughts. I had two minutes to talk about energy efficiency and here’s the gist of what I said

Efficiency programs and policies in Cascadia, if they are done well, can:

One response to Sarah Mirk’s history of dead freeways article in the Portland Mercury included a link to a video created by Streetfilms, documenting the Brooklyn Queens Expressway (BQE) in New York. That freeway was the child of planning legend Robert Moses. Streetfilms uses Portland as an example of what might have happened if the BQE had never been built. But, as I pointed out in my post about Mirk’s piece, any review of our regions history with road projects shows that we haven’t learned from the past; big road projects are still being proposed even though things turn out better with out them.