Where are the "creative financial instruments" to reduce resource consumption

The financial tools of our economy are supposed to find the most efficient way possible to deliver the priorities of our society.  In that sense, they can provide one of the most democratic tools to improving our quality of life.  All to often, however, the financial industry seeks only to creat wealth for the sake of increasing wealth and not to promote the furtherance of societal good.  As we saw in the financial collapse of 2008, the financial sector - free from the constraints of Glass-Stegall - found more and more complex ways to manipulate the economy in ways that increased risk instead of lessening it.  The time has come for us to put the creativity of the financial sector to use in promoting increased quality of life across all economic classes, while minimizing the need for commodity resources to attain that high quality of life.

For the past several years, Elevate Energy (formerly CNT Energy) has worked across disciplines to promote conversations that will lead to financial instruments readily available to all consumers that will allow them to reduce energy consumption cost effectively.  As summarized in a recent post, the challenges still remain, most notably in the areas of scale and delivery.  To address this we need creative risk-takers and willing communities to blaze the trail. Some opportunities include:

1.  Extending the utility energy efficiency portfolio requirements to include on-bill financing of any improvements that deliver a positive return on investment within five years.

2.  Utilizing property-assessed clean energy (PACE) financing whereby municipalities and other units of government can leverage future property taxes to make improvements to a property that deliver energy savings that provide a net positive ROI within ten years.

3.  Provide financial stability through loan guarantees to neighborhood building & loan-type entities that fund energy efficiency efforts.

4.  Utilize the existing network of home-improvement retail outlets and service professionals to aggregate a customer base, then fund the work through service contracts.

Any of these alone or in combination minimize risk and create opportunity.  As the Elevate Energy piece notes, demand has to lead supply, so options like the third and fourth allow for a gradual building of the marketplace to a point where the first and second can accelerate to scale.

This list only scratches the surface.  We need more people working on this effort, and finding opportunities to ease the lives of middle-class and lower-class renters and owners.  This will improve not only our national economy, but our quality of life.