Concord Monitor - An Energy Bill That Both Parties Can Love

Press Release

In a sign that bipartisanship is not dead and Washington is not completely dysfunctional, Sen. Jeanne Shaheen has joined forces with Ohio Republican Sen. Rob Portman to create the beginnings of a national energy efficiency strategy. The bill the pair sponsored, the Energy Savings and Industrial Competitiveness Act of 2011, contains a raft of commonsense measures to spur energy efficiency efforts that could save government, industry and consumers hundreds of billions of dollars.

The need to wean the United States off fossil fuels and New Hampshire, in particular, off its heavy reliance on heating oil, has been clear for years, but it takes money to save money. Making a home or business energy efficient has a steep upfront cost that serves as a barrier to progress. To get around that, the act includes lending policies that are already being used by forwardthinking electric utilities and some private solar energy companies.

The new law would create revolving loan funds, including one that targets the customers of rural electric cooperatives. Customers could borrow the money they needed to insulate homes, upgrade appliances and make other energy-saving improvements at an interest rate of no more than 3 percent and pay the loan back through their electric bills. A similar loan program operated by the Department of Energy would help finance energy efficiency improvements for commercial, industrial and municipal buildings.

The New Hampshire Rural Electric Cooperative, which has run a similar program for years, found that participating customers cut their electric use by one-third. The new law will allow a dramatic expansion of such programs.

New Hampshire stands to benefit in a big way, should the bill pass, since it is one of the most petroleum-dependent states in the union. More than half the state's homes heat with oil, and most of those homes are far less energy efficient than they could be.

Shaheen's measure would also save energy by increasing the efficiency standards of appliances and creating a model national energy efficiency building code that communities could voluntarily adopt. It also requires that the federal government, the nation's single biggest energy user, take steps to reduce the energy used by its millions of computers.

Congress should pass the energy savings act, but as Shaheen recognizes, it shouldn't stop there. It also needs to take steps to reduce the carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels that contribute to global warming. To do so, Shaheen would like to see a national version of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative.

In a polarized Congress where many climate-change doubters and deniers hold seats, we suspect that Shaheen will have a hard time finding a Republican partner in that effort. Portman, for example, claims that taxing carbon will costs jobs and damage the economy. But we urge her not to give up the search.

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