Washington State Chapter

Efficiency First is represented in Washington State by Home Performance Washington, a membership organization that brings together residential energy professionals and service providers, conservation programs, educational institutions and other stakeholders to fight climate change and foster economic development by enabling a highly effective whole-house energy retrofit industry in Washington State.

Our Policy Platform: Support for whole house retrofits is Washington State is growing. But there is danger that well-meaning programs under development could fail to permanently transform our residential energy services industry. Our recently released Policy Platform document attempts to begins to lay the groundwork for effective market transformation.

• Home Performance Washington Policy Platform [PDF]

Our Vision is that homeowners in Washington will have ready access to energy professionals they can trust to recommend and implement whole-house energy services that dramatically lower energy bills and reduce environmental impact while improving levels of home comfort, health, durability and safety.

Our Mission is to advance highly effective residential energy services in Washington State by:

• Promoting awareness of the benefits of whole-house energy services.
• Bringing energy professionals together to improve their ability to efficiently offer high quality services to customers.
• Ensuring the convenient availability of training programs that lead to nationally recognized professional certification.
• Supporting energy conservation programs to advance their goals in partnership with home performance companies.
• Working in close cooperation with aligned local, regional and national organizations.

Issues

Washington has traditionally lacked Home Performance or other whole house energy retrofit programs outside of the low income sectors. That is beginning to change, with the emergence of new programs such as Puget Sound Energy's Home Performance with EnergyStar program and a Seattle pilot program to audit 5000 homes. In addition, new Community Energy Programs have been funded through stimulus grants and will be coming on line soon throughout state.

Home Performance Washington has worked hard to encourage and shape these programs to maximize the effective delivery of services in conjunction with the home performance industry.

Our Committees

• Policy
  • Advocate for effective legislation, rules and program design to enable a permanent, financially sustainable home performance industry.
  • Work with Efficiency First on federal policy.
• Technical Standards
  • Promote and enable training and certification programs for auditors and retrofitters.
  • Work with conservation programs to promote adoption of consistent and effective technical standards.
• Industry Marketing
  • Work with conservation programs on common messaging and strategy to promote the widespread adoption of home performance.
• Membership
  • Acquire and serve members
• Organizational Development
  • Ensure HPW is built to last

Memos