At the second annual Clean Energy Summit in Las Vegas yesterday (Monday, August 10th), there was the usual gathering of great scientific and engineering minds, stirred liberally with a mix of politicians. Lots of rhetoric and a few great ideas, mostly geared toward bending public policy to make the massive, urgent transition to renewable energy sources as painless as possible given the current economic climate. Tall order.

This might not be as sexy as a windfarm on green slopes, but it might be more effective.

It’s disappointing that there isn’t more talk about distributed energy sources – private land owners, mostly businesses and residents in sub/urban areas, installing their own solar and wind energy sources and selling back to the grid – as it seems most attendees at this event were only interested in utility-scale renewable energy projects, almost entirely on remote public lands. While our massive and growing appetite for energy certainly requires some large-scale facilities to be built, it seems the emphasis is much too heavy on this approach, and the huge cost, in dollars and environmental damage, of the required extensions to the energy transmission grid. Distributed energy systems would make use of existing rooftops, and engage users in a much more meaningful way, incentivizing conservation and eliminating much need for additional power lines through sensitive habitats. But of course large scale operations are easier to grasp, forecast costs, and therefore package and sell to investors. And this, my friends, is how these things really get done. Someone needs to judge a project a good investment, strictly in dollars, before it will ever get the green light.

So it was nice to see proper consideration given to another distributed, difficult-to-forecast source of energy savings, given precisely because it promises to be SUCH A GREAT INVESTMENT. What we’re talking about here are energy efficiency retrofits of existing buildings, a potential boon to businesses and residents alike, and a major pillar in the Obama administrations plan to cut greenhouse gasses in the coming decades. The scale of these projects is immense, but the payoffs can be huge. Even just skimming the surface can reap huge rewards, as shown in our earlier post Wanna Make $133,000 on an Office Building?

But in the report titled Rebuilding America: A National Policy Framework for Investment in Energy Efficiency Retrofits, published just in time for the Clean Energy Summit, the authors lay out an excellent argument for massive and organized legions of newly-reemployed construction workers, executing “deep” retrofits of existing commercial buildings and homes, meaning overhauls of windows, lighting, heating and cooling systems, as well as systematic changes in use patterns. With the right policies and incentives in place, these programs could create upwards of 625,000 permanent jobs.

Building owners are of course frightened by the costs, especially if they’ve been reading the business pages at all lately. But here’s the deal: Buildings now account for 70 percent of all US electricity consumption, and 40 percent of total US greenhouse gas emissions. Deep building retrofits can cut energy use by 20 to 40 percent with proven techniques and off-the-shelf technologies. With creative financing tied to the projected energy cost savings, where the owner pays down the loan at a rate that matches the projected savings, a near net-zero effect on the bottom line can be achieved. Read that again. You can make all these changes, get it properly funded, do the right thing for the environment, and there is no real net cost. And here’s the kicker: After the loan is paid off (generally in 3-10 years), you just keep on saving, and at a higher and higher rate as energy prices continue to push up, which they inevitably will. How many investments do you have in your portfolio with that kind of performance, let alone feel-good mojo?

Download the report >

Go to the Clean Energy Summit website to learn more >

- but skip the video, it’s worthless without any meaningful audio. We’re assuming it’s a technical glitch that will get fixed.

Tags: business efficiency, energy audit, green jobs, saving energy, saving gas