Colorado Chapter

Issues

Federal Legislation – We follow and share information concerning pertinent Federal and State legislation with our members and community. Including:

• Retrofit for Energy and the Environment Performance (REEP): Provide efficiency professionals with information and opportunities to participate and support ongoing legislative efforts and share conversations about what it means for the marketplace and your business.
• Home Star: We are actively engaging our political representatives and encouraging Home Star legislation while committing our efforts to ensuring all stakeholders are participant in the programs design.
• Comprehensive Climate & Energy Legislation: Focus on long-term results that will encourage, protect and sustain the home performance contracting industry far into the future.

Apprentice & Mentor: We encourage the apprenticeship model and invite anyone interested in energy efficiency, energy audits or home performance contracting to get involved and inquire about a possible mentor to guide you into the industry. Student chapters are currently available at the University of Colorado, Red Rocks Community College and Colorado State University.

Community Allies: Governor’s Energy Office, Boulder Green Building Guild, Southwest Energy Efficiency Project, City of Boulder.

Improving Business Performance and Marketing: Work together to build regional awareness of energy efficiency benefits. Identify challenges in the marketplace and help efficiency vendor’s work effectively together and with providers of renewable energy services. Focus on issues such as developing workable business models, developing a trained workforce and the best methods to train them, and finding practical solutions to barriers such as deferred maintenance tasks.

Working Groups

There are many ways for you to participate in Efficiency First:

Efficiency First Colorado Advisory Group – Industry professionals invited to guide and advise the Colorado State Chapter.

Efficiency First Colorado has identified four key areas that impact programs and affect our industry:

• Business Models: What are the most successful business models for Home Performance contracting? Use this data to guide program development, and create a system that will help Efficiency First members incorporate these practices into their own businesses.
• Finance and Incentives: Identify national, state and local finance models to help all homeowners retrofit their homes, and document finance models that allow homeowners to amortize retrofitting costs over time.
• Workforce Development: Enable the Home Performance industry to identify and hire the most alert, intelligent and well-trained workforce available, and position Home Performance jobs as attractive, well-paid careers. These two goals together will help to deliver a consistent and effective workforce for the industry.
• Marketing: Review specific program markets and the industry as a whole to identify successful strategies for contacting, educating and engaging consumers to adopt home energy improvements on a large, national scale.

Governor’s Energy Office - Support to GEO Working Groups

• Technical – This group will look at standardization and building consensus around some uniform practice in Colorado pertaining to approaching residential efficiency. This group will also consider how EE practitioners are measured and monitored, how they are certified, and what standards surround that effort. A primary effort here will be to look at existing utility programs to understand how we could reach a uniform program with uniform rebates.
• Programmatic - This group will tackle consumer awareness, financing, and training. We might consider breaking this into several sub-sub groups and GEO can offer staffing assistance to several of these.
• Regulatory - This group is looking at building departments and how they could be leveraged to verify some work, or how we could strive for uniform process across the codes jurisdictions for retrofits, Public Utilities Commission and addressing long-term sustainability of the industry and policy at the state and local level.

Memos