A new national scorecard ranks California, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Oregon, New York, Vermont, Washington, Minnesota, Rhode Island and Maine as the ten states with the strongest programs in conserving energy and cutting down on greenhouse gas emissions.
The third-annual scorecard from the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy looked at several measures, including spending by utilities on energy-efficiency programs, state transportation policies, state building codes and appliance efficiency standards. It used 2007 data, the last year for which complete data are available from all states.
Total annual spending on the efficiency programs is expected to rise from $3.1 billion in 2008 to $7.5 billion to $12.4 billion by 2020, according to a separate study released by the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab.
Galen Barbose, a staff research associate at the national lab, told the Wall Street Journal that the spending increase has been so sharp "that there's an emerging shortage of trained professionals to design the programs, measure results and do the actual work of retrofitting buildings."
