Advanced Energy Perspectives

Energy efficiency is the fastest and cleanest way for the nation to meet our energy needs. It is also an enormous market opportunity for businesses within the sector and has the potential for billions in savings for consumers. Unfortunately, this win-win energy resource has come under attack in state legislatures across the country the past two years.

This has been a bit of a roller-coaster year for advanced energy in state legislation, with high profile rollbacks in Ohio and Indiana, but big steps forward in Minnesota and Connecticut. South Carolina became the latest state to adopt a renewable energy goal, setting the stage for solar growth there. New financial incentives for advanced energy investments were passed in a host of states. And more states started to look at ways for electric and natural gas vehicles to contribute to road and highway maintenance, as they are not subject to gasoline taxes.

Note: some links in this post reference documents in BillBoard, an application in AEE's new energy policy software platform, PowerSuite. Click here and sign up for a free 14-day trial of PowerSuite.

Workers lower an HVAC unit onto the roof of a school. Photo courtesy of McKinstry.

This week and last, the AEE Institute published first-ever surveys of advanced energy employment in California and Iowa. Both states are known as advanced energy standouts, each in its own way. California is an across-the-board leader in climate and energy policy, with a strong greenhouse gas law and a 33 percent renewable energy standard. Iowa gets more than a quarter of its electricity generated by wind and its farms contribute greatly to the nation’s renewable fuels capacity. But now we can state with certainty that those noteworthy characteristics translate into thousands of businesses and tens of thousands of advanced energy jobs – in California, hundreds of thousands.

Here are the top-line findings from the two reports.

Note: Several links in this article reference documents housed in Advanced Energy United's (previously Advanced Energy Economy)'s energy policy software, Insight Engine™. To enhance your reading experience, click here and sign up for a free 14-day trial of Insight Engine™.

Three months ago, the two largest investor-owned electric utilities in Arizona submitted proposals to the Arizona Corporation Commission (ACC) that would allow them to own residential solar systems and, effectively, become players in Arizona’s competitive distributed solar market. The proposals sparked a controversy over whether monopoly utilities should be allowed to own rooftop solar. Now the ACC Staff has recommended that the Commission accept one of the proposals. If the ACC accepts the staff recommendation, it could open the door for more utility-owned distributed generation (DG) in Arizona.

On October 22, the New York Green Bank announced its first round of transactions. When Governor Andrew Cuomo announced the $1 billion bank last year, it was touted as an innovative way to combine the goals and resources of the state’s public and private sectors.

“We will leverage public dollars to attract private sector investment into building a new clean energy economy that will help make our state greener and create jobs,” Cuomo said in a statement. The bank will use “limited state resources to drive investment into critical areas of the economy.”