The Bay Area and our neighbor to the north, Portland, Oregon, have had a friendly competition over which of us is the greenest state. Portland scored big points by providing proof positive that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) a.k.a. the Stimulus Bill, has crated good paying, permanent jobs in the new, greener economy.

The Energy Efficiency and Community Block Grant (EECBG) program, which targets urban settings for energy efficiency building retrofit, economic stimulus, and job creation is a sister program of the Weatherization Assistance Program. Both programs are supported by the Department of Energy. Both programs are on the chopping block in the current House budget. The City of Portland, with the help of Green For All, a national nonprofit organization that works to spread the benefits of the new green economy to every level of the economic hierarchy, was given through EECBG access to $1.1-million for a pilot program to retrofit 500 homes in the Portland area. But the money was not a grant—it is a revolving loan. Portland has leveraged the loan fund with public and private investments to generate to date close to $7-million in homeowner investment.

The results so far:

• More than 500 newly retrofitted homes that use on average 450 therms of gas and 7,700 kWh of electricity less than they did before retrofit. At about $1 per therm and $0.12 per kWh (which is what I pay to PG&E) that equals a savings of $1,374 per house per year.

• Employment for 381 construction workers making an average of about $25 per hour. The workforce is about 50% people of color and 8% women.

• Almost one-quarter of the pilot project dollars have gone to minority- or women-owned businesses.

The administrators of the program, including the City of Portland, Energy Trust of Oregon, and Conservation Services Group provide support in the form of information, marketing help, and discounted training to the company’s involved. But the companies were also asked to make a commitment to the communities they serve. The companies hire locally, establish long term relationships with their employees, and move towards having all their employees trained and certified through the Building Performance Institute (BPI) a nationally recognized, and widely respected standards and certification body.

But so far I’ve only given some statistics. There is a story that better illustrates what the Portland program is all about. I spent two summers working as a volunteer in the skid-row area of Portland, around Broadway and Third Street back in the mid-80s. I met a lot of homeless men and women, some Vietnam vets, some World War II vets, who had little hope of a better life. One nun I worked with gave her homeless clients birthday parties as well as other help, just to give then a sense of individual dignity and importance.

Alber Horsely Jr. is a 25-year old formerly homeless Portland resident who was recently trained as a weatherization technician and now has a job earning more than $15 per hour—and he has health benefits. There’s nothing like a job to give a person a sense of dignity and worth and to inspire other homeless men and women and give them some hope for a better future.

The City of Portland, through the 500-home pilot program is working to extend the program to all of Oregon and thereby do energy efficiency upgrades, bringing better health and comfort as well as energy savings to the residents of 6,000 homes per year. Come on California, time to catch up.

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I began my trip last week with a few days visiting my father, two sisters, and a bunch of nieces and nephews living just north of Washington DC in Maryland. Both my sisters have recently been treated for cancer, so it was very good to see them happy and healthy. My older sister lost her job around the time she was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. After her COBRA insurance ran out she was able to join the high-risk pull for health insurance provided through the state of Maryland.

My father is a former NASA engineer who retired early to take care of my Mom when she was dying of cancer. Dad has a pretty good retirement plan. In his working days, he traded the higher pay he could have received working for a private company with lower pay but solid government benefits. When you see the weather satellite images during the local news weather report, chances are my Dad was somehow responsible for the performance of the satellite.

From visiting my family I traveled just a few miles south and west for the mid-Winter meeting of the National Association of State and Community Services Providers (NASCSP). My Dad dropped me off at the hotel where the conference was held. As we made our way south along Wisconsin Avenue we passed what seemed to me like several blocks of newer buildings that are part of the National Institutes of Health.

I came to the same NASCSP meetings in 2009, right around the time that the Obama Administration was pushing the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) through Congress. ARRA provided $5-billion to the DOE Weatherization Assistance Program. I described the atmosphere at the 2009 NASCSP meetings as like “drinking water from a fire hose.” Many community action agencies were preparing to double and triple their staff; buy equipment; and weatherize two or three times the number of homes they were used to weatherizing in half the time.

Their lives in 2010 were tough. Everyone from state attorney’s general and the federal Office of Management and Budget to the Department of Labor and the National Historic Preservation Program were looking over their shoulders demanding a level of accountability that would ruin most other agencies. There was some bad press about wasted funds and corruption and only back page, below the fold coverage of the successes. But the success of the weatherization program is clear. The program created more than 15,000 jobs in the last quarter of 2010. More than 330,000 homes were weatherized through ARRA so far, mostly in 2010. For every dollar spent almost two dollars has been returned to the economy in the form of savings on utility bills and increased economic activity. The health benefits of homes made healthy through weatherization for families and children is hard to calculate.

NSCASP and the Opportunity Council in Oregon announced a partnership with the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) on the Healthy Homes Project, which will determine the most cost effective way to make homes healthy as well as energy efficient. The performance metrics for healthy homes are:

• Less asthma attacks (meaning less visits to the emergency room where many low-income families go for basic health care)
• Less school days missed
• Lowered stress on caregivers

Now if only we can get the NIH involved….

Government works when it is directed towards helping its citizens live healthy and productive lives. The current House of Representatives wants to zero out the weatherization program funding and take back the ARRA funds that haven’t been spent, in order to “help balance the budget.” One of the reasons I hope that the weatherization community partners with the NIH to help create healthy homes for families and children is that the NIH does research that benefits wealthy white men—the kind of people who are the decision makers in Washington.

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This 1928 home in Albemarle County, Virginia recently
underwent a renovation through the EarthCraft Virginia
existing homes renovation program. After the renovation,
electricity use dropped by 24% and energy costs dropped
by 42%.

Home Energy Magazine is celebrating its 25th anniversary with a special May/June issue. We're taking the opportunity to look back at the past several decades of energy policy in America, and look ahead to what may come. Here's a sneak preview of some of what we're thinking.

Alan Meier, Senior Executive Editor, and Steve Greenberg, Technical Editor, among others, lived through the first energy crisis precipitated by the Arab oil embargo in 1973 and its aftermath. They remember the sudden interest in energy efficiency and renewable energy; the proliferation of solar water heaters on the roofs of homes that broke down quickly, had no one trained to fix them, and have become rusted monuments to the best of intentions gone wrong; the sudden and short lived gain in the average car’s fuel efficiency. They also recall some major successes: the huge and lasting increase in appliance efficiency, especially refrigerators; the success of the Energy Star program; and California’s progressive Title 24 building standards.

Alan, in a yet-to-be-published editorial, has been musing on what will happen after the billions of dollars from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) have been spent on building and retrofitting more efficient and sustainable buildings. Will it be the same three steps forward, two steps back pattern that we’ve seen before? Not so, according to Alan, if we:

Steve came up with some powerful images to stimulate our thinking about the future of energy efficiency:

We've been on a ramp with a rather gradual (and usually upward, with notable exceptions) slope. Suddenly the ramp gets so steep it looks like a wall. If we make it to the new, much higher level, what does the terrain look like? Do we go off a cliff, completing a boom and bust cycle the likes of which we've never seen? Or is there a reasonable ramp down to a sustainable level?

I lived through the lines for gasoline, though I couldn’t yet drive. I've observed the resulting interest in miles per gallon instead of horsepower; the return to a horsepower-mentality; and the recent switch back to a concern about miles per gallon. My family had a great experience with our new-fangled heat pump in the early 70s. My Dad, an engineer and all-around handy man, first got me interested in how houses and cars work during that time. I guess I vote for a steep, but not impossible ramp up in efficiency, followed by a less intense, slow and gradual climb that continues for a long time, with sudden jumps due to new, undreamed of (or only just dreamed of) technology. The pressure will come from high energy prices and people starting to feel the real effects of global warming and unhealthy air. I don't think these things will change anytime soon.

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