How do you increase energy efficiency, spur renewable energy and cut carbon emissions – not in Boulder or San Francisco, but in the largely rural, working-class regions that make up most of America? CLEER has developed a successful approach that combines the following strategies.
CATALYZE CHANGE
CLEER embraces its role as a clean-energy catalyst. It accelerates the transition to a clean-energy economy by bringing together local governments, institutions, businesses and leaders, inspiring them to take action, challenging them to set ambitious goals, advising them on the steps necessary to achieve real results, and building the political will to stick to the program. It also works at the grassroots level, creating a sense of excitement and rallying the community to achieve a common goal. Every community or jurisdiction needs this kind of clean-energy leadership.
IDENTIFY & REMOVE BARRIERS
Nobody wants to be inefficient, but there are many barriers – financial, institutional, psychological – that keep us from switching to cleaner, more efficient options. CLEER focuses on identifying these barriers and removing them. Often this entails working one-on-one with property owners to help them access rebates or financing. It can also mean negotiating agreements with utilities to buy back power from homes with solar systems, working with car dealerships to offer discounts on electric vehicles, or running trainings to teach contractors about the latest technologies.
MEASURE WHAT YOU WANT TO CHANGE
“You can’t manage what you can’t measure,” goes the old saying, and that’s certainly true of energy-efficiency efforts. CLEER is all about inventorying current energy use – whether in a building, a school system or a local economy – to establish a baseline for setting goals, and then monitoring progress. CLEER tracks the amounts invested in clean-energy projects, the money and energy saved, the economic benefits to communities, the tons of emissions avoided, and even, thanks to its Building Energy Navigator network, the real-time energy usage in over 150 institutional buildings in western Colorado.
FOCUS ON THE ECONOMIC BENEFITS
CLEER embraces its role as a clean-energy catalyst. It accelerates the transition to a clean-energy economy by bringing together local governments, institutions, businesses and leaders, inspiring them to take action, challenging them to set ambitious goals, advising them on the steps necessary to achieve real results, and building the political will to stick to the program. It also works at the grassroots level, creating a sense of excitement and rallying the community to achieve a common goal. Every community or jurisdiction needs this kind of clean-energy leadership.
MAKE IT MAINSTREAM
Clean energy is no longer a technological or economic challenge – it just needs better marketing. CLEER devotes a lot of its efforts to positioning home efficiency upgrades, renewable energy systems and electric vehicles as mainstream and perfectly sensible. Through media stories, case studies, events and advertising, CLEER shows how your neighbors, downtown businesses and local governments are all jumping on the bandwagon. Personalized “energy coaching” – a practice CLEER has helped pioneer – turns homeowners and businesses into eager participants in an area-wide project to save money by saving energy.
TELL STORIES, CELEBRATE SUCCESSES
Having achieved tangible, measurable results, CLEER shares its stories and celebrates successes to inspire more participation. We work hard to place these stories in the local media – putting a human face on saving energy, talking up the bottom-line benefits, and explaining the nuts and bolts of how others can do the same. These are hopeful stories that illustrate what we can achieve when we work together, and they build on each other to create a movement.
DEMONSTRATE AND REPLICATE
CLEER is demonstrating a powerful model of change that can be replicated in other parts of rural Colorado and across the country. The toolkit that CLEER has developed for Garfield Clean Energy, a collaboration of local governments, is a practical, proven template that a number of other communities have expressed interest in adopting. CLEER is now seeking funding to support this replication initiative to achieve energy savings, rural economic development and emissions reductions on a much greater scale.
