A few days ago I broke down the efficiency policies in play in the recovery bill and said,

"...the best case scenario would be for Congress to adopt the House provisions in conference (with the exception of the Senate's version of the tax credit for home efficiency upgrades)."

And that's almost exactly what happened. Congress clearly took the President's words to heart and in the process created or saved 1.5 million clean energy jobs (in efficiency and renewables) according to our calculations. In the case of efficiency, the funds will help the ailing construction industry get back on its feet by transitioning them to improving the existing building stock.

The results are impressive,

* $5 billion for the weatherization assistance program. This creates roughly 90,000 jobs and starts the massive scale up of the home efficiency industry that we need to meet the President's goal of improving the efficiency of the building stock by 25%. To get to our climate change goals, we absolutely have to scale up this industry even well beyond this level.
* $4.5 billion for greening the buildings of the General Services Administration (a portion of which will be used for efficiency). Each dollar spent on efficiency in these buildings will come back to taxpayers many times over since we pay these bills every single year.
* $3.1 billion for State Energy Programs, including the conditions that if satisfied could lay the groundwork for savings of $135 billion dollars. The states will use this money for their new and existing efficiency and renewable programs, but enticing them to allow their utilities to profit from efficiency and updating their building codes is absolutely huge.
* $3.2 billion for the local block grants for efficiency and renewable energy.
* $250 million for retrofits of low income multi-family rental housing through the Department of Housing and Urban Development. This money will get out to performance contractors almost immediately and return to tax payers nearly immediately, because many of the residents of these buildings also receive government assistance on their energy bills.
* An extension and improvement of the tax credit for home efficiency upgrades which avoids wasting government money by adopting performance criteria that will actually save energy.

This is coupled with funding for many other agencies and programs that may be used on efficiency, although that is far from certain. Perhaps the President may have a few suggestions for these decision makers.

I have seen criticism of the efficiency pieces in the bill because these funding amounts are such large increases from business as usual. It's true that these are big jumps, but I am not sure when these folks feel the appropriate time for scaling up efficiency will be. The same scale-up issues will have to be dealt with whether we start the process now or 10 years from now. If we had acted this aggressively 10 years ago, we would certainly be in a better spot. The only solution is to get the ball rolling and use the savings from these policies to invest even further in efficiency and clean energy.

The policies in this bill, combined with the funding for renewable energy and transit infrastructure and the removal of funding for dirty fuels make this an exciting departure from the policies of the recent past. The $30 billion in appropriations and $20 billion in tax incentives for clean energy are huge strides towards the real energy policies that we need to meet our climate goals. Clearly Congress is responding to strong leadership from the new President and is committed to working with him to address the huge challenges we face.