Heat and Transportation Efficiency Utilities
Anne Watson, Montpelier City Councilor
Let’s expand the mission of our current efficiency utilities or create new ones to cover #2 Fuel Oil, Propane, and Transportation.
Pitch Summary:
Just like Efficiency Vermont helps Vermonters reduce their electricity consumption, parallel organizations (or an expansion of Efficiency Vermont’s mission), could do functionally the same thing for both the heating and transportation sectors. I know such a utility has been discussed in the past for heating oil and liquified petroleum, and that would be a good starting place, but the same sort of structure could be applied to fossil-fuel based transportation as well. These utilities could offer incentives, education, and services just like Efficiency Vermont does, but for these other sectors. There is no one-size-fits-all solution for heating nor transportation, but it needs to be someone’s job to work on reducing the demand and helping people switch to renewables. A fee could be added to everyone’s heating oil and propane bills, gasoline or diesel costs, that could go towards funding the utility and helping the most vulnerable in our community with weatherization, bus passes, electric vehicle incentives, etc.
Submitted by: Anne Watson –
[pdf-embedder url=”https://eanvt.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/EAN-Pitch-3-Anne-Watson-Create-Energy-Efficiency-Utilities-for-Heating-and-Transportation.pdf” title=”EAN Pitch 3 Anne Watson – Create Energy Efficiency Utilities for Heating and Transportation”]