The Bright Power Policy and Programs team spearheads the company’s efforts to address the many barriers facing multifamily energy efficiency and decarbonization projects. As improving building energy performance becomes increasingly critical to addressing climate change, the Policy and Programs team works alongside our Account Management and Service Delivery teams to provide incentive program knowledge, compliance expertise, and cost-effective solutions to all of our projects.
In an effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from buildings, municipalities across the country are enacting Building Performance Standards (BPS). BPS sets individual energy performance targets for each building based on its size, fuel mix, and occupancy. Each BPS is unique in its compliance requirements, reporting deadlines, and penalty structure and keeping track of just one, let alone multiple, can quickly become overwhelming. With the proliferation of BPS in recent years, the Bright Power Policy and Programs team has developed expertise in compliance consulting to ensure our clients stay ahead of laws and regulations and avoid potentially significant fines.
Our team dives into the complexity of these laws to outline clear paths to compliance, which includes maximizing all the available utility, state, and federal incentive dollars. These subsidies improve the economic viability of all project types like auditing, retrofit, new construction, and on-site generation. By tracking and analyzing the developments of each and every incentive program, the team ensures that our clients are equipped with the most up-to-date information to guide their decision-making.
But our work doesn’t end there. We also engage with utility companies, regulators, legislators, and state and federal agencies, which allows the Policy and Programs team to lobby for the continuation of much-needed incentives to drive investment in energy efficiency and decarbonization projects. By using our expertise and network of resources, we help our clients achieve their compliance and sustainability goals in the short term and well into the future.
Some recent examples of the Policy and Programs team’s efforts include:
- Successfully advocating to allow heat pump projects to receive incentives from both NYSERDA and Con Edison, making these projects more economically viable for a broader group of properties. Moreover, after Con Edison’s abrupt pause of the Clean Heat program last March, the team provided detailed feedback to the utility and regulators on ways to improve the program’s design and implementation. In corralling like-minded stakeholders and engaging in the review process, the team’s advocacy resulted in the creation of a separate pot of incentive dollars for multifamily properties.
- Bright Power’s participation in NYSERDA’s Building of Excellence (BoE) and Empire Buildings Challenge (EBC) funding competitions. The team’s external engagement with clients and stakeholders, as well as spearheading the necessary internal coordination, resulted in Bright Power’s clients receiving $4 million in BoE funding and a $5 million EBC award.
- Outside of New York, the Policy and Programs team worked hard to access two new energy audit programs in Washington DC (Affordable Housing Retrofit Accelerator and Commercial & Multifamily Energy Audits Program), allowing us to directly help clients prepare for the city’s upcoming BEPS compliance targets.
Want to see our team in action? Check out our recent webinars: one on NYC’s Local Law 97, another on the federal Inflation Reduction Act, and a series of webinars for the Institute of Real Estate Management (IREM). The IREM webinar series was very well received by the organization’s members and contributed to Bright Power receiving IREM’s NYC Industry Partner of The Year.
It’s rare and unique for a private engineering consulting firm to employ its own policy analysts, but the advantages are evident in the millions of dollars of incentives and avoided fines that the team facilitates. The Policy and Programs team is an invaluable resource to clients as they navigate the complex world of project financing and incentive procurement, compliance with intricate Building Performance Standards, and the new world of federal tax credits. Aside from the practical benefits, the Policy and Programs team is integral to creating the thought leadership that defines Bright Power as a frontrunner in the multifamily energy efficiency space here in New York City.
Questions? Want to learn how our team can help you? Email us: info@brightpower.com