People in Canada and the States and beyond have been working to put the pieces together on this for years now, Ramona. While Manitoba Hydro has been testing it in the inner-city, there's a small utility (91,000 customers) called Mid-West Energy, out of Kansas, that has been running the largest program to date, called How$mart. About 750 customers have had work done to date, with the jobs coming in at around $6,000 each. Maybe not huge, but that's 50-100 jobs in a small area so far. And they're still scaling up.

Another way people have been coming at it is through firms like Solar City, which offers Leases and PPA's on solar panels, so you don't have to pay upfront, but can pay for it per month or per kwh. They say they've done 28,000 buildings so far, which is great. But their customers have to have "excellent credit," and so far they haven't extended their offer to energy efficiency measures (though they just bought a firm in the EE field.) 

20 years ago, we put almost all the pieces together in Ontario - a utility that would let people repay their bills on their utility bill; plus a great loan package, 10 years at prime; plus contractors, energy auditors and the rest. But we couldn't get the utility to provide the cash upfront, which meant people still had to deal with the banks... and we couldn't get the cost attached to the property, instead, it stayed with the person.

Still, we got $150 million in retrofit work moving, so sortof a proof of principle for us. But we knew the tool wasn't easy enough to get anywhere near the uptake that is technically available. 

With luck, this time we can get it offered both into middle income as well as lower-income families... both homes and apartments... both efficiency as well as renewable energy equipment... and with the utility paying upfront... the bill attached to the property... and local groups promoting this thing like crazy in their neighbourhoods. I mean, in many ways, why WOULDN'T people take this up? 

It's always felt like if we could create this kind of financial tool - the way they created a series of new financing methods back during the depression and during earlier eras of governmental creativity - we could trigger an enormous explosion of jobs and activity. It's been frustrating, watching a field where the work was right in front of you, and the money almost literally leaking out of the walls... but without the tools to fix it. Housing got a boom after creating the long-term guaranteed mortgage, cars got their own customized financing methods, utilities who built power stations got their own long-term bonds - but all we had to work with were bloody bank loans, which were a complete hassle. 

With luck, this'll help trigger something more. Every time I see one of the new people working on the program, it helps make it worthwhile though. Like the Aboriginal woman in the story, doing carpentry. 

She's our Rosie the Riveter.

Hey Lulu, thanks for the congrats.

For a while, Manitoba Hydro had a New Homes program, whereby the builder (or buyer) got an incentive for going above code. I think this has ended now. We tend to use incentives to help move the market, by getting builders used to new methods, and then... we raise the standard or code to the new level people are now used to. Thus, no further need for the incentive! ;-)

As for opposition, well.... after having worked on this in numerous jurisdictions, the fact is that the only real opposition comes from within the utilities - the builders and trades and homeowners and governments and greens are all for it. Within the utilities, most often it's simply that utilities tend to be made up of people - especially engineers - who are trained to design and build and operate certain kinds of technologies. That may be coal or hydro-electric or nuclear or whatever, but what they most want in the world... is a new plant to play with. Which is understandable. 

What is infuriating, however, is to watch them come up with a seemingly endless list of reasons (legal, economic, logistical, etc.) why financing energy efficiency work is impossible... as compared to building a power plant. Which is crazy-making, when you just step back and look at it. I mean, building a new power plant is an enormous, concentrated risk of billions of dollars, takes years worth of approvals, could be upended by environmental change at any moment, etc etc. Whereas homes are built and renovations made by the hundreds of thousands each year. Nonetheless, they make it sound like radically uncertain crazy talk to add insulation to a bloody wall.

Anyhoo.... the key thing is that Manitoba has taken the next step.... and hopefully, we'll soon be passed by many others... and the game will truly be on. Changing the context for everyone. I'm hoping one of these days we get it to the point where we hit upon a Blue Box solution for recycling - where it's not some special activity that people have to work really hard to do, but just something that everybody does, and the whole system gets lifted to a new level. Cheers.

I'm not sure what the final legal terminology will be in MB (and there likely will be some argy-bargy negotiations to come), but basically, the owner has to pay a fixed monthly fee, similar to that paid for natural gas hook-up, for example, where the owner has to pay $15/month or whatever.