We’ve seen a lot of dull energy efficiency ads, but we fell in love with these humorous and memorable spots from CPS Energy, one of our clients. Check out these great commercials promoting CPS Energy’s whole-home energy efficiency programs.

CPS Energy has made three funny, informative and useful commercials to advertise its rebate program for homeowners in the San Antonio area–not an easy feat considering the subject.

They used everyday people…

And talking dogs…

And a call to action to drive people to their website…

If you’re interested in learning more about the CPS Energy Savers program and how program administrators have incorporated technology, including EnergySavvy’s Online Audit, to enhance their programs, be sure to attend the APPA Customer Connections Conference, November 6-9 in Savannah, GA.

CPS Energy’s Carla De La Chapa and EnergySavvy’s Tom DuBos will present “Helping Customers Any Time, Anywhere: Web Portals and Web Presentment,” at 4:15 pm on Monday, Nov. 7.

If you’ve seen (or produced) great energy efficiency video spots, we’d love to see them. Share links below in the comments.

Today, EnergySavvy takes the wraps off Program Optix, our newest software application for utilities running energy efficiency programs.

Program Optix is a software-as-a-service product for residential energy efficiency programs. It tracks customers from intake through completion. The software actively works to maximize program conversion rates while minimizing operational costs through software automation. For the past 6 months, we’ve been operating and fine-tuning Program Optix with three of our customers, Clean Energy Works Oregon, Community Power Works (Seattle) and Utah Home Performance with ENERGY STAR.

“Clean Energy Works Oregon is a unique program with sophisticated and evolving needs. EnergySavvy has been a great partner for us, continually delivering innovation while supporting our changing requirements. EnergySavvy Program Optix gave us the ability for the first time to track projects in real-time, optimize our program workflow and run our program more effectively,” said Derek Smith, CEO of Clean Energy Works Oregon.

We think Program Optix is a big deal for the residential energy efficiency industry because it represents a clear step towards program transparency and performance, delivered and measured by software. Coupled with our Online Audit and in conjunction with the program management services offered by our partners, Program Optix represents a new standard for an industry accustomed to running programs with custom-built Excel spreadsheets, Access databases and Salesforce implementations.

“Utilities running energy efficiency programs are demanding more savings per program dollar and have higher expectations for how those savings are delivered and measured,” said Aaron Goldfeder, CEO of EnergySavvy, “Program Optix will be table stakes for residential efficiency programs: coordinating program delivery and measuring performance in real-time.”

Learn more about Program Optix on our newly redesigned website, EnergySavvy.com.

Two upcoming Webinars featuring EnergySavvy team members and partners should be on your radar.

MEEA Technical Webinar Series Presents:
Engaging Homeowners in Energy Efficiency

Presenters: Scott Case, EnergySavvy and Brian Detman, Clean Energy Works Oregon

When: September 8, 2011 at 1:30 CDT
Register here: http://bit.ly/pAlsQV

When it comes to engaging homeowners in energy efficiency, one of the keys to success is making energy efficiency emotional. Through learnings from A/B testing with the Department of Energy and other Market research, EnergySavvy’s Scott Case will educate Webinar attendees on how social psychology triggers can nudge homeowners toward the deeper whole-home retrofit rather than the stopping at the rebated single measure.

Interested in how other programs are implementing these strategies? Brian Detman will share top marketing tips from the Clean Energy Works Oregon (CEWO) program. CEWO is an industry leading, ARRA funded program that has leveraged behavioral psychology and online marketing to retrofit 127 homes in the first five months of the program. Learn what successful marketing strategies program administrators are leveraging and replicate those strategies in your own program.

EGIA Leadership Academy Presents:
Motivating Homeowners to Take Action

Presenters: Rob McGarty, EnergySavvy and Diane Ferington, Energy Trust of Oregon

When: September 8, 2011 at 11:00 a.m. PST
Register here: http://conta.cc/pH5O2n

Taking into consideration the viewpoints of utilities and governmental organizations, contractors (trade allies), and homeowners, EnergySavvy’s Rob McGarty and Energy Trust of Oregon’s Diane Ferington will share their strategies on getting homeowners to take action in home energy efficiency.

The strategies include tactics to increase conversation rates, integrating diverse marketing messages and avenues, and balancing retrofit demand with contractor capacity. Importantly, Webinar attendees will learn how to “sell” home retrofits by combining the quantitative benefits of energy and money savings with the qualitative benefits of home comfort, health and safety.

Why home energy efficiency is more cost effective and better for our economy than replacing our nation’s dying nuclear power plants.

Over the next 20 years, the power plants that produce one-third of the nuclear energy in the United States will reach the end of their operational lives. In the wake of the Fukushima disaster, other countries (Switzerland, Germany) are reconsidering their commitments to nuclear power. In the U.S., Michael Levi asks in this Slate article whether we can shift from nuclear to other fuel sources for our power generation.

But we’d like to present an alternative option to the discussion. If we use power more efficiently, particularly in our homes, we can avoid replacing these aging nuclear power plants entirely.

For half the cost of a new nuclear power plant, we can retrofit 1,600,000 homes for energy efficiency and save the same amount of energy. Retrofitting the houses would create 220,000 new jobs – that’s 90 times more jobs than you’d get from the replacement nuclear power plant.

Crunching the Numbers

To be clear, we at EnergySavvy are not anti-nuclear. We’re not pro-nuclear either. We’re just presenting the numbers in way that we hope can inform the national discussion.

• In this comparison, a new nuclear power plant is expected to last 40 years and produce at the U.S. average of 12.3 billion kilowatt-hours (kWh) per year. The levelized cost of electricity for a new nuclear plant that we’re using is 8.4 cents per kWh, which includes the cost of financing, building and operating the plant for 40 years. The total cost for this plant and its power for 40 years is $41 billion.
• Instead, if you want to retrofit enough houses to eliminate the need for 12.3 billion kWh per year, the calculation works like this: A typical electrically heated U.S. home uses 20,000 kWh per year, which can be reduced by 30% with a $12,000 energy retrofit, based on various industry estimates. You’d need to retrofit just over 1.6 million homes to equal the entire annual energy production of a nuclear power plant, for a total cost of just under $20 billion. Home energy efficiency improvements in electrically heated homes include upgrading the efficiency of the electric heating system, insulating and making air sealing improvements to the home’s building envelope, using solar hot water heating systems and replacing inefficient A/C units and appliances.
• Job creation, in each case, looks like this: At peak construction, building a nuclear power plant would employ as many as 2,400 workers, eventually leveling out at around 400 to 700 long-term employees. For the home retrofits: According to Matt Golden, Policy Chair for Efficiency First, retrofitting 1,600,000 homes in a year would create roughly 220,000 jobs.

Caveats and Criticism

Of course, this kind of rough analysis uses many assumptions and can be subject to many criticisms. Let the discussion ensue:

• What about the cost of storing nuclear waste forever? While the operating cost of a nuclear power plant includes the storage of spent nuclear fuel during its 40-year operational life, the cost of safely storing that fuel for thousands of years afterwards is not included in this analysis. If it were even possible to estimate, the relative cost effectiveness of home retrofits would look much, much better.
• How do you really know what a new power plant will cost? We’re pretty solid on the home retrofit cost statistics, but the nuclear power plant cost calculations have a lot more uncertainty. Nuclear power plants typically take around ten years to build, so estimating the true cost is nearly impossible given fluctuating material prices, cost of capital and other unforeseen costs. Cost overruns for a nuclear reactor have averaged nearly 300 percent. The last nuclear power plant to go online broke ground in 1973 and wasn’t finished until 1996.
• Why are we picking on electrically-heated homes? Thirty percent of U.S. homes (according to EIA’s 2005 statistics) use electricity for heating. Many more use natural gas or heating oil, and most energy efficiency efforts focus on achieving efficiencies with those fuels. The impending nuclear power plant “retirement boom” provides a great opportunity to think about getting more efficient with electrically heated homes.
• Don’t nuclear power plants last longer than new furnaces? Nuclear plants have 40 year operational leases and can be extended for an additional 20 years. Different energy efficiency measures have different measure lives – LED light bulbs last less than 10 years, insulation and new furnaces can last for 30 years or more. For simplicity’s sake, we’re treating the measure lives of each option equally at 40 years.
• This is a lot of houses we’re talking about. Yes. If we want to avoid replacing some or all of the nuclear power plants that are going to reach the end of their operational lives within the next 20 years, we have to start retrofitting houses at volume now so we’re ready when plants need to start shutting down.
• Who pays for either of these two options? That’s a pretty complicated question and it certainly involves issues of rates and cost recovery within the utility regulatory field. We’re making the argument that investing in efficiency might be a better use of a utility’s resources than fully paying to build new nuclear power plants. Some innovative utilities are developing energy efficiency models that are increasingly cost effective, and work well for their shareholders and regulatory frameworks.

In the end, we don’t believe that any of these assumptions invalidate our conclusion that our country would be far better off increasing the efficiency of our housing stock through home retrofits over the next 20 years than replacing all our aging nuclear power plants. We can meet this impending energy challenge with half of the cost, create far more jobs and enjoy all the side benefits that come with going the retrofit route: healthier and more comfortable homes, lower utility bills for homeowners than what they would have paid, no increased burden of storing spent nuclear fuel for thousands of years.