Look around Connecticut. We don't have fracking for natural gas. There aren't underground oil deposits, and solar energy is just now starting to get popular. All that means when it comes to managing energy that’s often produced out-of-state, Nutmeggers have historically been pretty thrifty.
"Energy efficiency is about doing the same amount of work, with less energy," said Bill Dornbos, director of the Acadia Center in Connecticut, a non-profit that among other projects is helping to design energy efficiency plans for the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection. "But if you kind of think of it another way, it's also about preventing energy waste, which is costly, right? People needlessly paying for more energy than they need to buy to power their homes is a drag on the economy."
The new scorecard was released by ACEE, a non-profit energy efficiency research group. It tries to look at how well states are preventing that costly energy waste.
Connecticut ranked sixth on the scorecard, and Dornbos said it's impressive the state has maintained its high rank.
"In each of these scoring categories, whether it's transportation or utility energy efficiency programs, or building energy codes, Connecticut's turning in very solid policy efforts," Dornbos said.
Still, Dornbos said the state could do more. He wants Connecticut to adopt updated, more modern, energy-efficiency building codes. He also wants the state to push more combined heat and power: encouraging more industrial facilities to generate their electricity on site and use the waste heat from that to warm up their buildings.
