Comments heathersway has made

I was looking for market research on what motivates homeowners to take the plunge and invest in their homes with energy efficiency upgrades when I found this article.

It's an excellent insight into the behavior of building owners and our (U.S.) assumptions about how to create a market for energy efficient services and products.
I manage a federal/state program (home performance with ENERGY STAR) that aims to renovate homes using building science and diagnostics -- and to create sustainable jobs and reduce dependence on foreign/fossil fuels and by extension reduce climate pollutants and increase homeowner income through reduced fuel and electric bills.  (Sounds rather grandiose, printed here...)
This is a program for non-low-income homeowners...in other words, for a competitive open market that leverages private-public coordination.
Motivating the market to move forward with home energy renovations (not just energy audits) and balancing public demand with supply of energy evaluators has proven the biggest challenge for our little program.
The program may receive a surge of funding via Washington. The big question is, where is the money best spent?  Governments and educators and energy geeks assign moneys to training of energy auditors and installers and weatherization crews.  Separately, there's talk of a carbon tax on fossil fuels.  "Marketing" is frowned upon. 
Yet, if homeowners aren't informed, educated and buying --despite low interest loans and rational monthly payback scenarios -- then we're left with a trained but disgruntled and frustrated workforce of tradespeople and professionals.  And we will continue to have a public who are in the majority -- and to minimal fault of their own -- clueless about air flow and thermal boundaries and where their electricity actually comes from (the list goes on).  They will continue to brag about the thousands of dollars they just spent on windows and vinyl siding, not understanding where and how to spend their hard-earned middle to upper class money.
The studies David references reflect what we see on the ground.  Home energy renovations are first and foremost a marketing play...rational decisions based on payback do not move the market.  There are emotions at work here, not just cost-benefit payback calculations.
Spiking fuel costs led to a short-lived frenzy in the media and a state-based push to train energy auditors this past summer.   There was no marketing or publlc awareness campaign associated with the training.   Whether this push increased homeowner awareness and, more importantly, actual efficiency renovations -- done correctly or not -- is anybody's guess. 
This past summer I spoke at Tom's of Maine about residential energy efficiency, and the pressing question was whether wood pellet stoves were the answer to surviving a cold winter of high fossil fuel costs.  What this group wanted from me most was DOE's fuel comparison chart.  Air sealant and insulation...well, bore, snore.
We'll see if marketing will include incentives to the homeowner (that is, cold hard cash).  In other words, will there be marketing in the form of incentives. Will the incentives motivate the public to pay attention to energy efficiency over the long term, will it drive behavioral changes, and will the rules for receiving those incentives be based on sound building science and services (not products like windows and insulation installed without air sealing).  Will there be market messaging that speaks to emotions?

I contribute to cleantechblog.com and have wrestled with the use of capitalist mechanisms to fix planetary/human problems.  In preparing for a recent talk on participatory democracy in relationship to the environment, I said to a colleague that cap and trade was an abdication of policymakers to think through a difficult problem...that using a market mechanism to fix a planetary/human dilemma...is  lazy deference.  In the middle-math of the financial breakdown -- and with a stock market that is one of the more emotion-driven institutions outside of marriage -- it's refreshing to know the sacred cows of market liberalism and the reliance on the rationality of markets (aka, homeowners) are being called out.

Biodiesel BINGO on cleantechblog.com

I recently drove the brae biodiesel bus -- a converted Thomas International shorty schoolbus -- from Denver to Maine.  (brae is my energy consulting firm.  The bus, her name is Gertie, short for Gertrude.)

I wrote about the merry adventure -- the search for biodiesel -- on cleantechblog.com.  The five-part piece, titled Biodiesel BINGO, describes my trek through Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania (where the fuel filter finally clogged), New York and then Maine (where my last 5 gallons of Denver Biodiesel's waste veggie oil coagulated. I didn't want to part with it, so now it's frozen.)

The long journey had a purpose.  It was not a shot across the states in a loaned Flex Fuel vehicle to tout the wonders of biofuels.  I was not burning fuel simply to prove the merits of biodiesel:  I'm an energy consultant and was on my way to Maine to work on a home performance/energy efficiency program created by Maine's Governor Baldacci.

The Friday before Thanksgiving, I dined with a venture capital guy (a friend of my brother) at a fancy Mexican restaurant on Manhattan's Upper West Side.  He's invested in a few clean energy technologies that are getting lots of recognition and market play.  He condescended about the biodiesel biobus (I had some choice words about the MBA and JDs at one of his investor start-ups, so I had it coming.)

At the end of the evening and the end of one margarita, I proclamed "ethanol is a scam."  He agreed, delighted.  "Yes," he said, "ethanol IS a scam."  We parted, friendly-like, in our mutual disregard for ethanol.

I'm partial to the waste veggie oil that my local guys in Denver made for the Biodiesel Coop. That is a whole other fuel than the Archer Daniel Midland/Cargill biodiesel that I found promoted across the industrial farm belt.  That biodiesel?  Well, it's a scam, too.On A look at the impacts of biofuels production, in the U.S. and the world posted 2 years, 12 months ago 13 Responses