By Linda Taylor, clean energy director, Fresh Energy

So far in 2010, some big things have happened in the area of energy efficiency. It bears repeating time and again: the cheapest and cleanest energy is the energy we don’t use. Improving energy efficiency in our daily lives–meaning doing lots more with less energy–is 70 percent cheaper than generating new energy. The efficiency highlights so far in 2010…

• President Obama declared insulation sexy.
• Senator Amy Klobuchar’s held an energy efficiency forum at the Carlson School of Business of the University of Minnesota. Keynote speaker, Cathy Zoi, the Department of Energy’s undersecretary of renewables and energy efficiency, spoke of a new energy economy using space race and New Deal terms. Klobuchar expressly committed to personally working to develop a meaningful national energy efficiency resource standard (learn how to thank and encourage her on Fresh Energy’s Take Action page).
• The Minnesota Environmental Initiative hosted a January efficiency forum during which utilities talked about effective energy conservation programs to change energy consumption behavior–a big first.
• Fresh Energy coordinated the Minnesota release of the huge new Consumer Federation’s energy efficiency report that specifies, by state, potential energy savings and cost savings from a federal energy efficiency standard.
• Service Employees International Union Local 26, which represents over 3,000 janitors in the Twin Cities, won a new contract that includes green and energy efficiency practices.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 12th, 2010 at 9:30 am by Fresh Energy and is filed under Energy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.