Brittle Power- PARTS 1-3 (+Notes) - Natural Capitalism Solutions

Chapter Seventeen: Achieving Resilience 329rials (typically worth about forty dollars), which the Minnegasco then providesat no cost. The participants then return home and install the materials,advised by a roving “house doctor” from the city’s Energy Officer. Peoplewho want a more extensive building treatment (in the range of several hundredto several thousand dollars) are visited by a Minnegasco specialist whooffers an Energy Bank loan. This process has become a social event, with aparticipation rate of about half the households in each neighborhood—a targetwhich the “inviters” strive for. In about ten workshops, the neighborhood isweatherized. The five thousand blocks of Minneapolis should thus be weatherized,and residential energy use reduced by thirty percent, by 1985.Administrative costs, now covered partly by an Innovation Grant from thefederal Department of Housing and Urban Development, will be fully coveredby combining the neighborhood programs into the ResidentialConservation Service currently carried on by Minnegasco, which has operatedat higher costs and with less success than the city’s program.Palo Alto, California, through its municipal utility, is operating a solar loanprogram with eight percent annual interest, no down payment, and a paybackperiod of five to ten years. The utility’s reserves provided six hundred fiftythousand dollars of initial capital to get the program running. That processtook about three months, and the first loans were issued in eight months—about a third of the time expected. The reserves will be replenished and theloan program expanded through tax-free municipal revenue bonds, so that fifteenthousand installations can be made at the rate of ten per week. The loanscover the entire bid cost of each system up to thirty-five hundred dollars each.The city expects the program to stimulate the private financing and installationof another fifteen hundred systems. The loan program, which grew outof a study by six local governments of the feasibility of a municipal solar utility,includes consumer protection measures and system design and installationstandards, developed in workshops with seventy-six local businesses beforeloans were issued. 128 Altogether, seven California cities, starting with SantaClara, have already set up municipal solar utilities. California’s AlternativeEnergy Source Financing Authority, a new state agency, offers further options.Utility financing Years ago, Michigan Consolidated Gas Company loaned itscustomers money to insulate over a hundred thousand roofs around Detroit,because it was cheaper, even then, to insulate than to find more gas. Heatingoil dealers in parts of Canada and New England have similar programs forsimilar reasons. In the past few years, hard-pressed electric utilities—typicallydriven to borrowing to pay dividends—have discovered the economic advantagesof efficiency loans. Since efficiency investments typically decrease both