New Guide for Community Energy Strategic PlanningPage 1 of 28
Molly Lunn, Cheryl Jenkins, Claire Kilbane, Allison Ball, Marionette Richardson-Scott, Sarah Zaleski
Molly Lunn:Welcome to the Community Energy Strategic Planning Resources introduction. This is Molly Lunn from the Technical Assistance Program, and we’re really pleased you could join us here today. Next slide please.
So today we’re going to walk through a couple of different resources that we have available for Community Energy Strategic Planning. We’re going to start out with talking a little bit about why community planning is important and why your community might find it valuable.
Then we’ll hear from Cheryl Jenkins, from the Vermont Energy Investment Corporation to talk a little bit about a new guide that VEIC has helped the Department of Energy develop for Community Energy Strategic Planning.
Then we’ll hear from a number of folks from Cuyahoga County who participated in a planning academy that we held last fall using some of these materials to start developing their own plan. So they’ll talk a little bit about the work they’ve been doing so far.
And then we’ll hear from Sarah Zaleski. Sarah’s my colleague here at the Department of Energy, and also helps support local governments and technical assistance, and she’ll talk a little bit about some of the new opportunities we have available for technical assistance in the planning space.
We’ll open things up to questions and answers at the end, but if as we’re going around you have any issues you’d like to raise, feel free to enter those into the question box on the left, or on the right, sorry about that, and also if everyone can just make sure – this shouldn't be a problem – but just make sure that your audio is on mute as we’re going along to avoid any interference, that’ll be great.
And one last thing before we get started, at the end of the presentation, before we open it up to Q&A, we will have one poll question, one question for you, the audience, and we hope that you’ll be able to participate in that one question. So, next slide.
So really briefly before we dive in, I just want to talk a little bit about the Technical Assistance Program. Some of you may be familiar with it. Essentially TAP provides state, local and tribal officials with resources to advance successful, high-impact, and long-lasting clean energy policies, programs, and projects.
We think that TAP supports one of EERE’s key missions – and EERE is the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy within the DOE – and that is, taking clean energy to scale through high impact efforts.
So TAP has been around for over a decade at this point and handled thousands of inquiries, hopefully with some of you all, and most recently we had been focused on supporting Recovery Act grantees, whether they be SEP or Block Grant recipients.
We did that mostly through one-on-one assistance, an online resource library called the Solution Center and webinars, and the facilitation of peer exchange. Next slide.
So just like a lot of state and local governments, the Technical Assistance Program has been transitioning into a new framework, a post-Recovery Act framework, and I just want to sort of highlight that for you all so you understand where this falls into the broader Technical Assistance efforts that are available to you through the Department of Energy.
We are focused now on five key priority areas, and you’ll see at the very top is Strategic Energy Planning, and that’s what we’re going to talk a little bit about today. The other four include program and policy design and implementation, financing mechanisms, data management and EM&V, and energy efficiency and renewable energy technologies.
We are tackling those priority areas through a number of avenues. The first is resources, to disseminate standardized approaches and best practices. So again you’ll see we have general education materials, case studies, tools for decision-making, and protocols – and that’s a little bit about what we’ll be talking about today, sort of reconsider this new guide, we’ll be discussing one of our how-to guides.
Next, beyond resources we are facilitating communication and learning among peers because we consistently hear that that’s one of the ways that states and locals feel that they learn the most. So we do that with regional calls, webinars – like the one you’re participating on today, which is a national webinar – conferences and then a new offering we have are the Better Building Alliances. And Sarah Zaleski will be talking a little bit more about that towards the end, particularly as we begin to develop a working group through this effort specifically focused on strategic energy planning.
Finally, we do still continue to provide one-on-one assistance for very high-impact efforts with opportunities for replicability where we can help fill the gap in the technical assistance marketplace. Next slide, please.
So Strategic Energy Planning is one of our five key priority areas, and this webinar is going to focus specifically on our new Guide to Community Energy Strategic Planning. This guide will be published on our Solution Center in February, so in about two to three weeks, and everyone who’s registered today will be notified directly via email when it is available. You’ll get a link to where it is on the site.
In addition to the guide, we’re also offering a series of peer exchange and training opportunities. So obviously we have today’s national webinar. Next week then we’ll be offering sort of what we consider a part two to today’s webinar, which will really be a regional peer exchange focused on sort of the first piece of strategic energy planning at the community level, which is getting that okay to get started. And we’ll talk a little bit about that step later on when Cheryl goes into the different pieces of the planning process.
We’ll also in the next couple of months be offering a few additional national webinars on strategic energy planning. Those will be more at the state level. So we’ll be doing one on State Energy Planning based around a new resource that the National Association of State Energy Officials has been working on. It’s sort of a complimentary resource for this community level document that we’ll be talking about today.
And then later on we’ll be doing a webinar on Strategic Energy Planning and Economic Development, which will be of interest to both state and local governments.
Finally, as I mentioned before, Sara will be talking a little bit about a long-term peer exchange opportunity, which will be the Better Buildings Alliance Working Group for Community Energy Planning.
And then additionally, as I mentioned before, we do have one-on-one assistance available, so as you’re getting interesting and digging into the resources and the peer exchange opportunities, if you identify a need for more in depth one-on-one assistance, you are eligible – state and local officials are eligible to apply for that one-on-one assistance.
And if we can move to the next slide, this is how to tap into all those opportunities as well as other TAP offerings. So as I mentioned before, the Solution Center is our online library for resources, including the guide that we’ll talk about today and recorded webinars, things of that nature.
To get involved with regional peer exchange opportunities you can contact your local or state regional coordinator, and this link here will get you to a map of who those folks are with contact information.
For the call next week you’d want to contact your local or regional coordinator.
And then if you’re interested in the one-on-one assistance, you can submit an application by going again online to the Solution Center, and this is a direct link specifically to the application page.
Finally, to stay up to date on all of these offerings, you can sign up for our TAP Alerts by shooting us an email at this mailbox here – . Next slide please.
So now we’ll dive into the real heart of the presentation. What is strategic energy planning and why is it a priority area? At DOE we’ve determined that strategic energy planning is a priority for our work with state and local governments because we believe that it can help you all build off some of your initial or one-off energy successes, by moving from sort of that single project or program approach to a comprehensive, long-term energy strategy that will help you deliver benefits for years to come. So particularly as people are transitioning from Recovery Act work, we see this long-term planning work as a great place to support you.
Ultimately we think that the creation of a robust strategic energy plan will help your government and community save money, create local jobs, and improve national security.
Next slide.
So what is a strategic energy plan? It’s a long-term blueprint to focus and guide your efforts towards achieving an energy vision. Within your plan you’ll articulate goals, you’ll then identify strategies and actions to meet those goals, and allocate resources to complete your strategies.
And instead of, as I said, undertaking decisions on sort of a single-year, as-needed basis, the ultimate aim of the strategic plan is to be proactive, comprehensive, structured, long-term and enduring. Particularly as resources are a little more limited, taking sort of that long view and thinking about things across your government or your community’s portfolio we think is a good approach to start with.
So next slide.
To that point, some communities will pursue doing a CESP, as we short of short-hand Community Energy Strategic Plan, so they’ll pursue that CESP maybe perhaps just for their local government operations, and that could include a focus on just your buildings and facilities. It may also include your fleet, and really basically concentrate your activities around people that the government has a direct influence on – personnel, the government’s budget, that kind of thing.
Or it could be a little bit broader. So it could include activities for the entire community, including your residential sector, your private commercial sector, industrial, community, you know, mass transit, that kind of thing. So either one is certainly an option. And these efforts might stand alone, or it might be sort of an energy-focused subcomponent of your jurisdiction’s larger master plan or economic development plan, or you might undertake energy planning as a part of a broader climate action or sustainability planning effort. The guide that Cheryl will talk a little bit about can be used for any of these cases and adapted as meets the need of your community.
Then you’ll also see in this graphic that your CESP is really particularly valuable when it’s coordinated within the framework of other existing regional or state level planning activities, so that complimentary policies and activities can facilitate coordination across the different jurisdictions. And you’ll also probably be able to tap into additional resources by taking that approach. Next slide.
So there are lots of reasons why a community might complete a CESP. As I mentioned, cost savings is a big one. Government agencies spend somewhere on the order of more than $10 billion a year on energy, and nearly a third of that is used just on buildings. So you as local governments really have the potential to provide savings to taxpayers by developing a plan that focuses on energy use within your buildings and your operations. And again, in a time of tightening budgets and rising energy cost, developing a plan can be an important component of good governance, as well as put you in a prime position to capture future funding opportunities. So whether those be opportunities that are offered at the state level or at the federal level, if you have a plan in place that sort of lays out your strategy for the future, you’re in a much better situation to then go out and get those funds.
Expanding to a broader community effort can lead to an even wider range of outcomes and related benefits, and you’ll see some of those here. That might be job creation. It could be greater energy security and influence over your energy choices. It might be that you want to enhance your potential for public/private partnerships, or of course just contribute to a cleaner environment or increased livability.
Again, everyone’s reason for doing the CESP will be a little different. We hear lots of different reasons from communities. But you’ll want to think about that as you’re deciding whether or not to approach it, because that’s how you’ll be selling your plan to your leadership and to your community.
So with that, I’d like to turn things over to Cheryl Jenkins. She’ll talk a little bit, as I said, about the new guide. Cheryl?
Cheryl Jenkins:Thanks, Molly, and welcome to everybody. We’re really happy to have you all here today and excited about talking to you about rolling out the new CESP guide. As Mommy mentioned, the guide really introduces a Community Energy Strategic Planning approach, which is then developed to be a step-by-step process for creating a robust and successful energy plan for your jurisdiction.
The guide is organized such that each step, which is a chapter in the guide, really provides a how-to approach with actual action items that you can take at each stage to make sure that you’re covering all the bases and developing a strategic energy plan.
It also provides tips, which are great ideas from the field, or interesting ways to approach certain steps that others have found have been really useful that might not be obvious. We’ve developed some tools in the form of templates, sample letters, checklists, sometimes calculators for each step that may be helpful to you in envisioning exactly what you need to do or actually in collecting information for your plan. We’ve tried to provide as many examples as possible from successful planning efforts around the country, given that this is something that a lot of jurisdictions are now engaging in.
And it also provides some appendices and lots of links to more in depth resources to give you further information on a lot of parts of the planning process. Next slide please.
This slide is going to set out the actual steps that the guide lays out. This particular process has decided that there are ten steps to the planning process. These steps are designed to provide guidance all the way from the very beginning of such a process, which is deciding who’s going to be in charge of putting together the plan, through assessing where you’re currently at, developing goals, identifying the actual actions and how you’re going to pay for them, all the way through adopting the plan and implementing and rolling it out.
I’ll talk in more detail about each of these steps in just a moment, but I wanted to say that our objective today is not really to have you go away with a complete understanding of exactly how you would go away and put together a plan, but more to give you a high-level overview of this approach and a flavor of the kind of detail and tools that you might expect to find in the guide itself. Next slide please.
So we’ve put together this little example timeline of a planning process to give you a snapshot of how the process might flow and how long it might take. And one of the things I want to point out about this is that while the steps in the previous slide were a very linear, step-by-step process, in truth, many of these steps are going to overlap. Some of them, like step two, you start up a process of identifying good stakeholders, those people are going to be engaged throughout the process. So it’s a way for you to really think about the things that can be done in parallel.
And also the timeframe that it may take. That particular piece is going to be quite variable depending upon the scope of a plan and how broadly you’re engaging the community, essentially the size of the plan, as well as the amount of focused time that people that are undertaking the planning effort could give it. But this is a great way to start thinking about what such a project might look like.
As you can see, this really is a full project. It’s a long-term project that’s going to take some effective management and some dedicated budget to get it done, and that means some commitment from someone higher up. Next slide please.
So in the guide we start off by [blip] concept of a strategic plan and why it’s important, and a brief overview of the CESP process and outcomes. But we’ve designated a Step Zero, which Molly sort of referred to earlier. It’s that in order to do a big planning process like this, you really will need to have authorization from a decision maker who’s in charge of your jurisdiction’s priorities and agenda as well as budget.
And so we’ve given you some hints on ways to actually think about the value of such a process and pull together the information you might need to talk to someone to essentially get approval to do such a project. And here are the action steps for that particular piece.