Research Publications

State Energy Efficiency Resource Standards (EERS) have emerged across the United States, becoming prevalent in the early 2000’s. EERS policies are state laws that require utilities to pursue energy efficiency as a cost-effective energy resource. As a result, billions of dollars have been invested in improving residential energy efficiency. The expressed goals of EERS policies include providing consumers direct economic savings by reducing wasted energy, and indirectly through avoided costs of constructing additional power plants. In 2016 alone, twenty-nine EERS states invested $2.5 billion in energy efficiency programs. While utilities regularly surpass annual energy savings goals required by EERS laws, the distribution of program benefits across subpopulations remains a concern for many stakeholders and energy justice advocates. This study takes a novel approach to examining EERS investments through an energy justice lens, taking the first step to assess distributional justice of residential program investments across socioeconomic groups: low-income (or income-qualified) and non-lowincome residents. To accomplish this, we develop a comparison metric, known as the Energy Efficiency Equity baseline (E3b), which estimates equitable utility investment proportionate to the low-income population in the service territory and as a percentage of the total residential energy efficiency investment portfolio. This study captures $5.6 billion of spending by eleven Investor-Owned-Utilities (IOUs) from 2012-2021, located in six EERS states: Connecticut, Colorado, Illinois, Massachusetts, Michigan, and Minnesota. The study reveals various distributional disparities in low-income investments and investment trends among utilities, with most underperforming relative to the E3b. However, recent trends suggest improvement by large utilities. Policy revisions, stakeholder intervention, and utility decision-making is beginning to shift this trend.