Lisa Schmidt from HEA talks about a free program to lower energy bills for Californians. HomeIntel focuses on “easy savings” with no purchases or $20-25 devices. Fyi, the California Energy Commission (CEC) supported HEA and volunteers to put together this educational website.

This is part 3 of our interview with Lisa. Go back to part 1 to learn about what “pay for performance” or part 2 to learn how free professional energy coaching works.

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TRAVIS:  Yeah. I mean for a retrofit you’re talking about five to six figures, probably in the five-figure range.

LISA SCHMIDT:  Yes. And you won’t get … I mean there might be reasons to do that sort of thing that improves the comfort or the quality of your life, but as a cost-effective energy saving method, they are usually not a good choice.

TRAVIS:  Speaking of retrofitting homes, there’s been a lot of talk about smart homes and net-zero homes in the past five years. What are your thoughts on the future of those things in helping climate change or making the homes more affordable?

LISA SCHMIDT:  Well, I certainly think that going forward, there’s a lot of good work going on for new construction. And we ought to make that as energy efficient as possible. Net-zero, that’s the California standard, and that’s great. The trouble is that there’s a huge housing stock that’s in existence that won’t be affected by these standards for quite a while. As a state, what we should be doing is directing our energy efficiency dollars or energy saving dollars to achieve the greatest savings for the least cost. And this is why Pay for Performance is lined up to do that so well. You want to find the most energy savings you can for the fewest dollars spent. You want to spread it out as far as possible.

LISA SCHMIDT:  In the state of California, there’s about a billion dollars set aside annually to address energy changes across the whole state in residential, commercial, industrial and agricultural. There’s about $300 million in residential energy savings. We want to be able to achieve the greatest number of kilowatt hours saved for the allocated $300 million.

LISA SCHMIDT:  And most of that is going to have to go into existing housing stock, so we want to spread that as far as we can. And smart homes are great. Net-zero are great going forward, but there’s a lot of work we can do on simple fixes like we were discussing before for that $300 million, it can get us a whole lot of energy reduction.

TRAVIS:  Yeah, especially when it’s something running all the time that no one knows about and no one cares about. It’s just leaking money everywhere.

LISA SCHMIDT:  Exactly. And the state has done a great job putting energy efficiency standards on large appliances. The best and first example is refrigeration. Back in the 1970s, a gentleman by the name of Rosenthal figured up that if we didn’t make our refrigeration more efficient, it would end up consuming the entire home’s budget for electricity. So, the state put in standards saying you have to have energy efficiency in the refrigerator to be at this level, and it has to keep getting better and better over time.

LISA SCHMIDT:  The refrigerator industry complained a lot and said, “Oh, my gosh. Refrigerators will be way too expensive. No one can afford them. We can’t possibly do that.” The state fortunately said, “No. You’re going to do that.” Well now, refrigerators are incredibly efficient and less expensive. Given the right incentives, the industry was able to innovate and get to that point. The same thing is happening now with heating and cooling systems. It happened with game consoles. For these common items, the state can say, “We were going to drive the efficiency to these big markets.” It can be done.

LISA SCHMIDT:  The problem is the great population of appliances and electrical devices is growing all the time. You now have heated baby wipe dispensers, recirculating pet bowl dishes. We even found a system in a house that takes in air and cools it down to kill microbes and then warms it back up and sends it out into the home. That’s using a whole lot of energy. There’s no way to put generic energy standards on all these devices. So, we have to keep finding those sorts of devices and figure out how to get people to use them less or more efficiently.

LISA SCHMIDT:  The state can do certain things to encourage efficiency in appliances–meaning the appliance does as much work as it did before using less energy. But we still keep adding more and more appliances and there’s no way to put a standard against all these appliances. It’s just a bigger problem than what regulations alone can handle.

TRAVIS:  This sounds like a little bit of pushing the rock uphill. What keeps you going, Lisa? Climate change is probably one of the biggest problems of humanity that we’re talking about right now. Getting people educated on things like that can’t be easy. So what keeps you going?

LISA SCHMIDT:  Two things personally if you go beyond climate change. That’s pretty much the driving factor. Most people you meet in this arena, including government regulators, people working for the utilities, people working for other energy saving companies, they really want to do this because they think it’s a good thing. They believe in reducing energy consumption to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. They really want this to work. While you may not agree with all of their methods or conclusions, everyone wants the same thing so that makes it very collaborative group. That’s pretty inspiring.

LISA SCHMIDT:  The second thing is our customers. We can make some really happy customers, and that’s fun to see. Our coaches do incredible things. When they fix stuff for our customers, it really makes them happy. Probably one other thing that drives me is that there’s a chance to spread a method of employment for people who may not have had chances for employment, may not want to go to college, can’t go to a college but haven’t become BPI certified HVAC technicians.

LISA SCHMIDT:  It’s a way to provide jobs for high school level youth that want to be able to learn and move into this field but don’t have the same high level of certification. We hope we can reach out to lower income communities, disadvantaged communities and help employ people in this work. We’re doing that right now with a group called Rising Sun. This organization has a two-pronged mission. One is to reduce energy consumption in hard to reach and low income communities to help them save energy and money.

LISA SCHMIDT:  And the other is to provide employment for youth out of these communities to help them learn about working in a service group and working in a technical capacity. It feels really good to support those organizations as well.

TRAVIS:  That’s great to hear, Lisa. Well, thank you for your time. I really appreciate your taking time from your busy schedule–taking out 30 minutes to talk to us. Before we go, having worked on this pretty hard problem of energy savings … If you have last one minute to share something that someone can immediately do, what’s the one-minute thing that they can remember?

LISA SCHMIDT:  Go around your house and count … Well, this is longer than a minute but once you do it, you’ll be able to remember it. Count or guess how many things you have plugged in your home. Then go around and count them and compare them. This process will give you a pretty good feeling of what the problem is. If you had just a one-minute thing is put a smart strip on your entertainment systems so that you turn everything off. But if you really want to expand your horizon, count all the things that are plugged in, in your house.

TRAVIS:  Okay. I meant that you can explain in one minute. But what you said would probably take 15 minutes.

LISA SCHMIDT:  You’d be surprised, but I challenge anybody to do it in 15 minutes. That’s a pretty … That will get you going.

TRAVIS:  Okay, folks. Go around your home and count how many devices are plugged in, and that will be a good start, right?

LISA SCHMIDT:  Yes, excellent.

TRAVIS:  We will have links to HomeIntel provided on the website.  The link is HomeIntel.hea.com. Okay. Well, thank you, Lisa, for your time.

LISA SCHMIDT:  Thank you, Travis.