Why does a 15 year old energy program matter so much today?

In 2009, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act provided the State of California with over $250 million dollars for energy efficiency programs to drive workforce development and reduce energy costs for homes throughout all 60 counties and utilities. Mindy was part of an early team hired for marketing and communications for the counties of Alameda and Los Angeles. Once onboarded, she and her team realized that each of the 60 counties and utilities were all planning their own separate programs. Seeing the challenge for the industry and the customers, Mindy brought together local government, utilities, the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) and the program lead, California Energy Commission (CEC) to build consensus on creating a single unifying program for the state by facilitating over 20 intensive partnering sessions and leading an ongoing statewide governance program. The result was Energy Upgrade California (EUC). Mindy managed the statewide marketing and communications campaign and a Working Group of partners for three years.

That is just the prologue to the story. The real story is that Energy Upgrade California was the first time that local government were given significant funds, resources, and technical assistance to provide energy efficiency programs to residents and to bolster their construction trades with workforce development to implement the programs. While the program itself had ups and downs, the star of the show was local government and their ability to catalyze local action beyond more traditional utility programs.

This realization led to the EUC Working Group to lobby the CPUC to become a more sustained and durable player in energy efficiency. After a lot of work by many different players, in 2013, the CPUC approved a new entity type - the Regional Energy Network or REN. A REN is a local government managed entity covering more than one county, supported by ratepayer funds. The first two out of the gate were the Los Angeles county SoCALREN and the Bay Area BAYREN. Thirteen years later, the RENs have expanded and cover nearly the entire state, providing energy efficiency programs focused on equity, gaps in existing programs, and on hard to reach audiences.

In the last Business Planning cycle, RENs received $664 million dollars of funding. These dollars are catalyzing decarbonization efforts, workforce development, streamlining building department permitting, and helping residents, businesses and now agricultural entities save money and create better buildings.

BluePoint is excited to have done extensive work with nearly all the RENs, with ongoing projects with the Inland Empire REN (I-REN), Northern Rural REN (NREN) and the TriCounty REN on the Central Coast (3cREN), providing strategic planning support, communications, business planning, and market analysis and program development support.

The RENs are the wave of the future as they connect their community-based efforts to climate planning, resiliency and local economic development. We can thank ARRA and all the people involved in bringing the RENs to fruition!