State EERS Successes
Success with Energy Efficiency Resource Standards (American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy)
Businesses Successes
Dow Chemical has saved $8.6 billion through a $1 billion investment in energy efficiency improvements since 1994. (Testimony before U.S. House Subcommittee on Energy and the Environment, 2/24/09)
Ninety-five percent of Wal-Mart Supercenters and Sam’s Clubs now include daylight harvesting systems, which can reduce up to 75 percent of the electric lighting energy used during daylight hours, saving enough energy to power 73 single-family homes for an entire year. (Wal-Mart Stores, Sustainable Buildings Network Fact Sheet)
Johnson Controls, a Fortune 500 manufacturer in Milwaukee, has seen explosive growth in the building efficiency sector, which now accounts for more than one third of the company’s 140,000 employees and $38 billion in sales in 2008. (The Pew Environment Group)
Mosaic, a leading fertilizer company, has invested over the past 30 years in heat recovery and electrical generation systems at its manufacturing plants in the United States, enabling their plants to reduce electricity purchases by approximately 90 percent. (Mosaic Co)
New Jersey’s Honeywell International has a $38 billion portfolio, nearly half of which is tied to energy efficiency products and services. A typical $10 million contract can create or sustain 95 jobs, for Honeywell engineers, local subcontractors and manufacturing workers in suppliers, auditing buildings for energy efficiency improvements and overseeing comprehensive retrofits. (The Pew Environment Group)
A combined heat and power (CHP) system at an Ethan Allen furniture factory in Vermont reduced energy costs by 10 percent, enabling it to continue operations and save 550 jobs. (U.S. DOE, Combined Heat and Power: Effective Energy Solutions for a Sustainable Future, 2008)
The combined heat and power (CHP) system at Qualcomm’s San Diego corporate campus has been saving more than $700,000 per year since its installation in 1995. Success with this system motivated the company to install an even larger system nearby at a new data, engineering and test facility in 2007, which meets 85 percent of the campus’s energy needs. (EPA CHP Partnership, CHP – Energy Savings and Energy Reliability for Data Centers, 2008.)
A project to recycle waste heat at the ArcelorMittal Steel Mill in East Chicago, IN generates 220 megawatts of electricity and 400 megawatts of thermal energy – saving the plant $100 million annually and generating more clean energy than all the world’s grid-connected solar collectors and more than all the wind turbines in Indiana and Illinois combined. (Recycled Energy Development)
