Will Congress score a touchdown or drop the ball on energy efficiency?
ACEEE Blog, September 9, 2015. Image credit: Daniel X. O’Neil
The NFL season is opening tomorrow, but the legislative season is already entering crunch time. Energy efficiency legislation is now on the field: energy efficiency titles are in the Senate bill, which passed out of committee in July and awaits time on the Senate floor, and the House bill, which may be considered by the full committee as early as next week.
We thought it was time to look at the stats. As we have in other years, we estimated the likely impacts of 15 proposed energy efficiency policies here. Since the House and Senate bills are moving targets, we combined the policies into three packages: the first down package with provisions that have received wide support, a more aggressive touchdown package, and a fumble package of provisions that drop the ball. Some of the impacts are shown in the figure below.
The first down package includes several provisions in the Senate bill and a few that should be added. It would really move the ball down the field. More specifically, it would:
- save consumers almost $100 billion due to lower energy bills, even after needed investments,
- create over 100,000 additional jobs by 2030, and also
- reduce carbon dioxide emissions in that year by almost 50 million metric tons, the emissions of 10 million cars and light trucks.