What We Heard You Say…This Week’s Best and Worst Quotes about Energy Efficiency

Interesting quotes about energy efficiency we picked up this week.

Best Straight Talk

  Why EE needs  business model innovation “The first thing to recognize is that energy efficiency on a retrofit basis has been a colossal failure since 1975. To suggest that energy efficiency, even though it pays for itself, has really caught on is simply not true.”  Jigar Shah in an EnergyEfficiencyMarkets.com podcast about his new book, “Creating Climate Wealth: Unlocking the Impact Economy.”  (Shah recommends some interesting ways forward.)

Most Open to Debate

• Not smart grid? “One could argue that, except for the Internet, the most important technological advance of the last two decades has been hydraulic fracturing, widely known as fracking.” Bryan Burrough, The Frackers’ and the Birth of an Energy Boom, New York Times 

Best Description of an Energy Efficiency Neurosis

• Not easy being a green consumer “I actually start hyperventilating in the light bulb department in Home Depot: sooooooo confusing,” Ms. Finkelmeier wrote in an email. She later said: “My problem has been, as in most houses, you’ve got all these different kinds of fixtures with different bases and you go in there and there’s words like Par 30, and the lumen thing. I am unclear how that translates.” This Little LED of Mine, New York Times. 

Best Financing Insight

• What it’s going to take “With all the talk about secondary markets, we have a much more tactical upfront issue which is lack of demand and low volumes of deal flow. First, we have to get to big enough numbers in terms of aggregated deals to make energy efficiency interesting as an asset class. To get there we need to overcome a range of tactical barriers to underwriting risk on energy efficiency projects and increase deal-flow. It is a catch-22, but I do think we are making progress (though slower than I think everyone would wish).” Matt Golden, Efficiency.org in discussion on Energy Efficiency  Markets LinkedIn Group (Join to see more of what Matt has to say!)