Apparently, 'tis the season for local governments and municipalities to take a stand on energy efficiency. In the past two days, I have received news about more than a half-dozen cities or towns that have signed energy efficiency and savings contracts with two of the companies offering energy savings performance contracts Ameresco and SourceOne.
Here are the quick details:
Truth be told, there have been many other deals like this that I have noticed throughout the past two months, which you can see if you peruse the Web sites of these two companies, along with some of the others that I am following.
Examples include Honeywell Energy Services (which recently teamed up with Somerville, Mass.), the City of Houston's $23 million project with Schneider Electric, and Pepco Energy's $6.1 million deal with Greensboro, N.C. There are countless others, I'm sure, that I will hear about as soon as this post goes live. I would especially love to hear about what's working, what's not and where the saved money is going.
There's a whole list of potential energy services partners on National Association of Energy Services Companies Web site. I don't have any particular read on who's great or not.
In my mind, these communities are demonstrating the sort of leadership that other municipalities could benefit from emulating. With local government budgets squeezed across the United States -- and the situation likely to get worse before it gets better -- cities and towns would do well to address energy efficiency before slashing deeply into the budgets for citizen-facing services. I'm betting we'll hear a lot more about deals such as these in 2011.
Additional background reading:
This post was originally published on Smartplanet.com