Before we get into the national round-up, we wanted to highlight one particularly action-packed story out of Minnesota. The headline from the Star-Tribune is ‘Energy squads’ find and stop waste":
As the biggest storm of the season so far descends on the Twin Cities, some lucky homeowners are getting expert help battening down the hatches and lowering their utility bills. The bonus? It’s costing them peanuts.
The Center for Energy and the Environment (CEE) in Minneapolis and Neighborhood Energy Connection (NEC) in St. Paul, both nonprofits dedicated to energy efficiency, began pilot programs in the fall in select neighborhoods. Their crews replace light bulbs, wrap fiberglass blankets around water heaters and weatherstrip doors. All the homeowners receiving these customized services had to do was attend a free workshop, then pay $30. Besides the installed products, they get utility-bill savings averaging $127 a year.
Xcel Energy Inc. and CenterPoint Energy pay both programs’ labor costs as part of their efforts to meet state-mandated conservation goals. But in January the two utilities will begin offering Home Energy Squad, their own joint program, to other customers in the seven-county metro area. It will be a limited version of the neighborhood-focused visits offered by NEC and
CEE, and will expand over the next three years. You must be a customer of Xcel electric and either Xcel gas or CenterPoint gas to be eligible. This is the first time the utilities have collaborated on such a broad scale, said Todd Berreman, who oversees CenterPoint’s conservation programs.
And what allowed CEE and NEC to expand expontially? You got it, the Recovery Act. Who else has been reaping the benefits of the Recovery Act? Let’s go with alphabetical order so as not to offend anybody:
Fonte: White House