By Justin Gerdes
Forbes
9/25/12
One of the signal achievements of the Obama
administration is a success hidden in plain view. Scorned by
Republicans and rarely mentioned by Democrats, the American Recovery and
Reinvestment Act (ARRA), or simply “the stimulus,” was many things at once –
tax cut, lifeline for cash-strapped states and local governments, and, as noted
by Michael Grunwald in his important new book The New New Deal, “the biggest and most
transformative energy bill in U.S. history.”
The stimulus directed $3.2 billion to the Energy Efficiency and Conservation Block Grants program.
As I wrote at this
blog in January and again in June, these grants have enabled
dozens of California cities to slash their energy bills by investing in LED
streetlights and other energy-saving upgrades.
The stimulus also included a one-time
supplemental appropriation of $5 billion for the U.S. Department of Energy’s
Weatherization
Assistance Program. In December 2011, DOE announced it had reached its goal, three
months ahead of schedule, of weatherizing 600,000 low-income homes nationwide. According to DOE data, as of January 2012,
612,390 homes or apartments had received energy retrofits courtesy of the
stimulus.
Many states dramatically scaled up staffing and
other resources to handle the surge of energy efficiency-related stimulus
funding. What happens now that the ARRA spigot has run dry?
Weatherization and carbon trading
In a September 19 post at Home Energy magazine’s blog,
Macie Melendez reported on a plan that could enable states to maintain their
scaled up weatherization programs. A major topic of discussion at the recently
convened annual conference of the National Association for State Community
Services Programs (NASCSP),
Melendez wrote, was how to keep weatherization programs relevant and funded in
a post-ARRA world. Carbon markets just might be the answer.
One of the presenters at the NASCSP conference
was the organization’s new Carbon Trading Project Director, Jo-Ann Choate.
Melendez recounted Choate’s plan:
Weatherization reduces carbon but
states/companies/organizations aren’t currently being monetarily rewarded for
doing so. In order to leverage additional funding for WAP [Weatherization
Assistance Program] and receive those ‘rewards,’ NASCSP is currently developing
a national framework to measure carbon emission reductions from weatherization
activities and sell carbon offsets in the voluntary carbon markets in
compliance with the Verified
Carbon Standard (VCS).
The NASCSP would verify, register, and sell
carbon offsets for the participating states. After credits are sold in carbon
markets, NASCSP would distribute the proceeds back to each state.
The plan is not without precedent. In December
2010, the Verified Carbon Standard approved the first new methodology for
crediting reductions of greenhouse gases achieved through home weatherization.
The methodology was developed by MaineHousing for the Efficiency Maine program.
The operating assumption is that weatherized homes that perform better than a
pre-determined benchmark are eligible for salable carbon credits.
The Maine program has been beset by controversy surrounding its cost and
alleged conflict of interest among its key stakeholders, but many states are
keen to press ahead. Melendez reported that 17 states have signed on to
participate in NASCSP’s Carbon Trading Initiative.
Carbon metering
How confident can NASCSP or Verified Carbon
Standard be that a weatherized home produces measurable energy and carbon
savings? In search of an answer, I recently spoke with Mark Aschheim, Professor and Chair, Department
of Civil Engineering, Santa Clara University (SCU). Aschheim and Jorge Gonzalez, a former SCU mechanical
engineering professor now at City College New
York, co-lead a team that developed a carbon metering method that quantifies
real-time energy savings in buildings and associated carbon offsets. The
technology, Carbon Meter, was developed to measure the energy performance of
Santa Clara University’s entries into the 2007 and 2009 Solar
Decathlon.
One of the goals of the Carbon Meter, Aschheim told me,
is to be able to measure the gap in performance of a house or commercial
building performing to a baseline (say, California’s Title 24 building energy
efficiency standards) and one going beyond it. Once you quantify that
differential, he said, it opens up other possibilities, including salable
carbon credits. The meter also quantifies the benefit of electricity generated
by photovoltaic cells.
With the ability to measure real-time energy
performance, Aschheim said, you can quickly develop a thermal model for how the
building is performing – as a system, not just individual components. “That can
be useful because you can verify that performance met the intention,” he said.
LEED and other green building rating programs are
good on paper, Aschheim commented, but not so good with verification. “This is
a way to field verify that you’re getting the performance you intended,” he
said. “It might tie into guidance as to what the best retrofit options are –
given that your house is performing this well and you have these kinds
of windows and insulation, here’s the best bang for the buck.”
California regulators have approved four
categories of carbon offsets in its soon-to-launch cap-and-trade program:
forestry, urban forestry, ozone depleting substances, and agricultural methane.
On September 17, Reuters reported on an American Carbon Registry study
finding that California’s carbon market could be 29% short of offsets in its
pilot phase (2013-2014) and 67% short of offsets in its third phase (2018-20),
unless regulators expand the categories of approved offset project types.
At a minimum, the Carbon Meter represents for
California regulators a potential new offset category: carbon savings from
retrofits. Coupled with NASCSP’s Carbon Trading Initiative, the Carbon Meter
presents California and other states with the means to generate a source of
salable carbon offsets that could help keep weatherization programs alive.
Aschheim conceded that he and his team have
focused more on the technical demands of the Carbon Meter project than
financial returns. They filed both an invention disclosure and patent
application but have not marketed the tool.
The Carbon Meter is listed at the Stanford University Office of Technology
Licensing portal. (Stanford handles intellectual property for Santa Clara
University, Aschheim told me.)
“It’s out there waiting to be grabbed and used,”
he said. Entrepreneurs, get on it.
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