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The following tools and resources have been useful to Department of Energy (DOE) programs and partners as they build and maintain their residential energy-efficiency programs.
- Residential Energy Dispatch newsletter
- Better Buildings Network View
- Voluntary Member Initiative Toolkits
- Tools
- Publications
- Additional Resources
Residential Energy Dispatch newsletter
The Residential Energy Dispatch Newsletter has been published since September 2018 as the information source from the Department of Energy’s Residential Building Integration programs, focused on trends and opportunities for residential energy-efficiency upgrades programs. Subscribe to the Residential Energy Dispatch on the EERE website.
Current Issue
Past Issues
November 2024
September 2024
June 2024
March 2024
December 2023
October 2023
June 2023
March 2023
December 2022
May 2022
January 2022
Summer 2021
May 2021
February 2021
September 2020
June 2020
March 2020
December 2019
October 2019
July 2019
May 2019
December 2018
September 2018
Better Buildings Network View
The Better Buildings Network View was published from January 2014 – September 2018 as the official information source from the Residential Network. Residential Network news can now be found in the Residential Energy Dispatch.
Past Issues
May 2018
March 2018
February 2018
January 2018
December 2017
November 2017
October 2017
September 2017
July-August 2017
June 2017
May 2017
April 2017
March 2017
February 2017
January 2017
December 2016
November 2016
October 2016
September 2016
July-August 2016
June 2016
May 2016
April 2016
March 2016
February 2016
January 2016
December 2015
November 2015
October 2015
September 2015
July-August 2015
June 2015
May 2015
April 2015
March 2015
February 2015
January 2015
Voluntary Member Initiative Toolkits
Evaluate and Learn As You Go to Strengthen Performance Toolkit
Make evaluations more nimble and adaptable by integrating learning so that programs can make adjustments more responsively, rapidly, and with greater overall program efficacy.
Voluntary Initiative: Evaluate and Learn As You Go to Strengthen Performance Toolkit
Community-Based Social Marketing Toolkit
Use community-based social marketing to apply resources effectively, increase participation rates, promote a greater understanding of the value of energy-efficient homes, and strengthen relationships with residents.
Voluntary Initiative: Community-Based Social Marketing Toolkit
Training Toolkit
Identify training resources and opportunities to help staff, volunteers, and contractors enhance their understanding of building science; sales and marketing; residential energy-efficiency program offerings; and business development.
Voluntary Initiative: Training Toolkit
Determine the best social media platforms to engage potential home energy upgrade customers by building brand awareness and refocusing your marketing efforts to target their energy-efficiency needs.
Voluntary Initiative: Social Media Toolkit
Designing Incentives Toolkit
Design incentives that motivate potential customers to act by lowering the risk, decreasing the cost, or offering additional benefits of home energy upgrades.
Voluntary Initiative: Designing Incentives Toolkit
Partnerships Toolkit
Understand what constitutes a partnership, establish the need for partnerships, identify potential partners methodically, conduct partnerships, evaluate them, and communicate their success.
Voluntary Initiative: Partnerships Toolkit
Learn about upcoming voluntary initiatives and how your organization can get involved.
Tools
Solution Center
The Better Buildings Residential Program Guide is a robust online collection of nearly 1,000 examples, strategies, and resources from Better Buildings Neighborhood Program partners, Home Performance with ENERGY STAR® Sponsors, and others. This one-stop shop helps residential energy upgrade program administrators and partners plan, implement, manage, and evaluate their programs more effectively through a series of handbooks containing step- by-step guidance and lessons learned.
The Residential Program Guide provides:
- Tips for success
- Examples
- Tools and templates
- My Favorites tagging capabilities
- Email updates for new content
- Opportunities to see your materials featured
Learn more by reviewing a demonstration presentation and its accompanying slides and transcript. To ensure the Solution Center remains a valuable resource for programs and home performance professionals into the future, DOE invites users to explore the new tool and suggest additional content or materials for possible inclusion by emailing BBRPSolutionCenter@ee.doe.gov.
Cost-Effectiveness Tool (Version 2.0)
In April 2017, DOE’s Better Buildings Residential Program released a new, improved version 2.0 of a user-friendly tool for estimating the cost-effectiveness of a residential energy-efficiency program based on a program administrator’s inputs. Cost-effectiveness analysis compares the benefits (i.e., outputs or outcomes) associated with a program or a measure with the costs (i.e., resources expended) to produce them. Program cost-effectiveness is commonly used by public utility commissions to make decisions about funding programs or program approaches. Program designers, policy makers, utilities, architects, and engineers can use this tool to estimate the impact of different program changes on the cost-effectiveness of a residential energy-efficiency program. Following are the tool and its supporting documents:
Better Buildings Residential Program Energy Efficiency Cost-Effectiveness Tool (Version 2.0)
Image Libraries
The Better Buildings Residential Network has compiled a list of online databases that can provide your program with quality, high-resolution images to tell your energy-efficiency story. Many images can be used without attribution, while others require minimal attribution.
Publications
Innovative Community Energy-Savings Success Stories
The Georgetown University Energy Prize (GUEP) challenged towns, cities, and counties nationwide to rethink their energy use and to implement creative strategies to increase efficiency. The initiative brought together local governments, residents, nonprofit organizations, and utilities to demonstrate success in reducing energy consumption between 2014 and 2016.
Innovative Community Energy-Savings Success Stories
Health and Home Performance Report
Evidence in a new, groundbreaking DOE report, Home Rx: The Health Benefits of Home Performance, shows that home performance upgrades can improve the quality of a home’s indoor environment by reducing the prevalence of harmful indoor air pollutants and contaminants. This paper is just one part of DOE’s broader Health and Home Performance Initiative, which plans to engage stakeholders and develop a roadmap to facilitate the industry’s incorporation of health benefits into its work.
Home Rx: The Health Benefits of Home Performance
Peer Exchange Call Summaries
Catch up on past Peer Exchange Calls by accessing hundreds of call summaries on the following topics:
- Market Position and Business Model
- Program Design and Customer Experience
- Evaluation and Data Collection
- Marketing and Outreach
- Financing
- Contractor Engagement and Workforce Development
- General
Lessons Learned: Peer Exchange Calls
The Residential Network hosts a series of Peer Exchange Calls for members to discuss similar needs and challenges, and to collectively identify effective strategies and useful resources. Following are samples of lessons learned shared by members during various Peer Exchange Calls:
Lessons Learned: Peer Exchange Calls No. 42 (Summer 2024)
Lessons Learned: Peer Exchange Calls No. 41 (Spring 2024)
Lessons Learned: Peer Exchange Calls No. 40 (Winter 2024)
Lessons Learned: Peer Exchange Calls No. 39 (Fall 2023)
Lessons Learned: Peer Exchange Calls No. 38 (Summer 2023)
Lessons Learned: Peer Exchange Calls No. 37 (Spring 2023)
Lessons Learned: Peer Exchange Calls No. 36 (Winter 2023)
Lessons Learned: Peer Exchange Calls No. 35 (Fall 2022)
Lessons Learned: Peer Exchange Calls No. 34 (Summer 2022)
Lessons Learned: Peer Exchange Calls No. 33 (Spring 2022)
Lessons Learned: Peer Exchange Calls No. 32 (Winter 2021)
Lessons Learned: Peer Exchange Calls No. 31 (Fall 2021)
Lessons Learned: Peer Exchange Calls No. 30 (Summer 2021)
Lessons Learned: Peer Exchange Calls No. 29 (Spring 2021)
Lessons Learned: Peer Exchange Calls No. 28 (Winter 2021)
Lessons Learned: Peer Exchange Calls No. 27 (Fall 2020)
Lessons Learned: Peer Exchange Calls No. 26 (Summer 2020)
Lessons Learned: Peer Exchange Calls No. 25 (Spring 2020)
Lessons Learned: Peer Exchange Calls No. 24 (Winter 2020)
Lessons Learned: Peer Exchange Calls No. 23 (Fall 2019)
Lessons Learned: Peer Exchange Calls No. 22 (Summer 2019)
Lessons Learned: Peer Exchange Calls No. 21 (Spring 2019)
Lessons Learned: Peer Exchange Calls No. 20 (Winter 2019)
Lessons Learned: Peer Exchange Calls No. 19 (Fall 2018)
Lessons Learned: Peer Exchange Calls No. 18 (Summer 2018)
Lessons Learned: Peer Exchange Calls No. 17 (Spring 2018)
Lessons Learned: Peer Exchange Calls No. 16 (Winter 2018)
Lessons Learned: Peer Exchange Calls No. 15 (Winter 2018)
Lessons Learned: Peer Exchange Calls No. 14 (Fall 2017)
Lessons Learned: Peer Exchange Calls No. 13 (Summer 2017)
Lessons Learned: Peer Exchange Calls No. 12 (Spring 2017)
Lessons Learned: Peer Exchange Calls No. 11 (Winter 2017)
Lessons Learned: Peer Exchange Calls No. 10 (Fall 2016)
Lessons Learned: Peer Exchange Calls No. 9 (Summer 2016)
Lessons Learned: Peer Exchange Calls No. 8 (Spring 2016)
Lessons Learned: Peer Exchange Calls No. 7 (Winter 2016)
Lessons Learned: Peer Exchange Calls No. 6 (Fall 2015)
Lessons Learned: Peer Exchange Calls No. 5 (Summer 2015)
Lessons Learned: Peer Exchange Calls No. 4 (Spring 2015)
Lessons Learned: Peer Exchange Calls No. 3 (Winter 2015)
Lessons Learned: Peer Exchange Calls No. 2 (Fall 2014)
Lessons Learned: Peer Exchange Calls No. 1 (Summer 2014)
Case Studies
Residential Network case studies feature members to fulfill our mission to share best practices and learn from one another to increase the number of homes that are energy efficient. Following is a series of Residential Network member interviews exploring successful strategies:
Case Study: Community-Based Social Marketing in Fort Collins
Case Study: Financing Multifamily Energy Upgrades
Case Study: Multifamily Housing
Case Study: Community Engagement
Case Study: Partnerships
Residential Real Estate White Paper
The “Capturing Energy Efficiency in Residential Real Estate Transactions: Steps That Energy Efficiency Programs Can Take" white paper prepared by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory provides examples of programs around the United States that are successfully engaging the real estate community and overcoming barriers to valuing energy efficiency in the home resale process. The research draws on literature and interviews with efficiency program staff and real estate professionals. Watch the white paper webcast to learn more.
State Energy Efficient Appliance Rebate Program Reports
With funding provided by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, DOE developed the State Energy Efficiency Appliance Rebate Program (SEEARP) to spur economic activity and invest in long-term energy savings by helping consumers replace older, inefficient appliances with new, efficient models. SEEARP provided almost $300 million to the 56 U.S. states and territories to support state-level consumer rebate programs for efficient appliances from December 1, 2009 to February 17, 2012. The successes and challenges of SEEARP provide valuable lessons for designing and running a consumer-focused appliance rebate program. Two reports provide results and program design lessons.
Program Design Lessons Learned (Volume 1) draws on the insights DOE gathered from its more than four years of administering SEEARP and analyzing the nearly 1.8 million rebates and the associated reporting from the 56 state and territory programs.
Program Results (Volume 2) includes program impacts reports summarizing individual state and overall results.
In addition, the SEEARP reports database includes final rebate facts sheets, rebate summary fact sheets, and report data files.
Guide for Program Benchmarking
DOE developed a Guide for Benchmarking Residential Energy Efficiency Program Progress With Examples to make program progress benchmarking more common among residential energy efficiency programs. Work on the guide started more than a year ago with input from Residential Network members and Home Performance with ENERGY STAR® Sponsors. The guide is intended to help residential program managers:
- Identify metrics that measure their goals
- Develop a program benchmarking plan to identify their program's strengths and weaknesses
- Measure progress for years to come by establishing a baseline of performance
- Gain insights from comparing to peers
- Communicate success with key stakeholders
Guide for Benchmarking Residential Energy Efficiency Program Progress With Examples (final version)
Draft Guide for Benchmarking Residential Energy Efficiency Program Progress
“Guide to Benchmarking Residential Program Progress With Examples” webcast slides.
Additional Resources
DOE Residential Programs
Better Buildings Neighborhood Program
More than 40 Better Buildings Neighborhood Program partners launched local programs to test a wide range of program delivery business models in their communities. These partners helped more than 100,000 households and businesses save energy, live more comfortably, and reduce their utility bills through energy upgrades between summer 2010 and December 2013.
Home Energy Score
Similar to a vehicle's mile-per-gallon rating, the Home Energy Score allows homeowners to compare the energy performance of their homes to other homes nationwide. It also provides homeowners with suggestions for improving their homes' efficiency.
Home Performance with ENERGY STAR (HPwES)
Offering whole-house solutions to high energy bills and homes with comfort problems, HPwES is managed by a local sponsor that recruits home improvement contractors who are qualified to perform comprehensive home assessments.
Weatherization and Intergovernmental Programs Office
This office strategically coordinates with state, local, tribal, and K-12 school district leaders to accelerate the adoption of energy efficiency and renewable energy technologies and best practices. These partnerships help American communities, businesses, and industries overcome barriers to a viable energy economy.