 Good afternoon everyone. We're going to start our next session and for this particular session I am so happy to introduce Beth Craig who is the director of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Climate Protection Partnership Division. The Climate Protection Division of EPA has been doing a lot of very interesting work and hard work over the last 20 years and I think that there are many interesting things that you will hear from Beth and so I am so delighted that she is here with us today and of course make sure that you check out EPA's booth in the expo room. Thank you. Thank you Carol. That was going to be my after saying thank you to Carol for inviting me here today but to make sure that you check out the booths we're really excited with all the materials that we could bring with us that I think we've thoughtfully managed to get into three linear feet and there's probably more than three linear feet of materials but please help yourself. As Carol said my division has several partnership programs in it one of them is the energy star program green power partnership combined heat and power partnership program which I know you heard some of these things in the earlier panel and then we have a group that also provides support for state and local governments on energy efficiency programs but today I'm going to focus primarily on the fact that we are completing the 20th year anniversary of the energy star program which for us obviously is a huge deal and we want to I want to talk just have a little bit of a retrospective but really talk more about what we're doing today that I think might be of interest to this group. I've planted a couple of people in the audience so if things get really boring and you start nodding off they'll stick their hands up and ask me interesting questions of which I hopefully know the answer but you know I just want to forewarn you. So back in the early 1990s as the agency made the decision on you know how do we address greenhouse gases as an agency what we came up with was thinking about it from the voluntary perspective and so how do you put together so it was founded on the idea that greenhouse gas emissions could be reduced by overcoming market barriers that prevent consumers and businesses from doing what's in their financial interest which is choosing energy efficient products but also energy efficient behavior and practices and then from the very beginning of the program it was designed as a market transformation program you know you want to work with the players in the marketplace identify the barriers that prevent them from being more broadly adopting efficiency developing smart strategies that kind of look at things from the long and the short term perspective and then also thinking about it from an energy for it's not just energy efficiency but one of the hallmarks of the program is when you buy an energy star product we want the product to have the we want the quality of the product to be so good that you'll go back and buy another one because what we don't want is for someone to get at home and say yes it's efficient but I'm either sacrificing some type of performance or I just don't like it which is one of the reasons when we've spent so much time on light bulbs it's not just whether the bulb is efficient but do people like the color you know making sure that it doesn't have crackling noises those types of things so over the last 20 years we've expanded the program from starting off from a handful of products initially it was computers and lighting to 65 different energy star product categories to new homes support for existing homes and commercial buildings and we also do some work with industrial plants as well we've worked with cement with a cement industry printing all of the rest because we're looking at energy management in a strategic perspective so over the last 20 years we have had we now have about 18,000 partners we've prevented more than 1.8 billion metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions and saved over 230 billion dollars on utility bills and we've done it all voluntarily so we're pretty proud of the accomplishments of the program but we also have a lot that's going on today that I want to talk a little bit about so as I said we have the 65 different product categories all of those products are certified by third-party independent organizations we put out a specification last January for to increase the efficiency of new homes and we put the energy star label on 15 different building types everything from a senior center to a data center to an office building K through 12 schools so it's a wide variety of buildings that can that that building owners can benchmark against other buildings of their type and we can identify the top 25 in 25% in energy efficiency but beyond that we also are thinking about strategic energy management for all buildings so if you have a building type that we don't label you can still go into our portfolio manager and you can benchmark that building and you can over time see if what you're doing to the building is making a difference in terms of your utility bills so so that kind of sets the stage the things we're working on today in terms of products is on a regular basis going into our the current product areas and saying is it the right time to revise the specification to be more energy efficient and that of course is more of an art than a science technology in some product areas is moving very quickly in other areas it's not moving quite as quickly so it's not like there's a it's not like every product is updated at the same time we are also always looking for new products to bring into the energy star family so this past year we brought in pool pumps we brought in commercial water heaters and when you think about it you think huh how much could those make a difference but both they're there they may be different examples a pool pump there may be a lot of them out there and even if you get small efficiency gains it's going to be a big thing in other types of products you may be to have there may not be as many products but if you can get if you can get relatively large gains the greenhouse gas emission benefits maybe maybe quite large so one of the other things we have done in the last year is we realized there's there are consumers out there who are the early adopters of new technology and we always think of them in terms of the high-tech you know they're the ones who want the next piece of consumer electronics but there is also that group who are interested in it from the environmental perspective they're looking at it from a new technology perspective so within the energy star family of products we've come up with we've come up with a recognition called most efficient and so 13 of our products were recognized in 2013 as most efficient so within that particular product category there's these products at the very top that if you would go in maybe to a store you might be able to see them recognized and if you're very interested in that product you may pay a little bit more for most efficient but maybe you want to be driving the efficiency market in that direction so this year we have it's a wide variety so it's everything from geothermal heat pumps to TVs and windows so it's so every year we're going to be looking at which products we want to bring into the most efficient family in terms of new homes as I said we increase the specification the energy efficiency specification of new homes last year so this year and probably the next couple will be working with builders and home energy raiders as they adopt this into the marketplace and also reaching out to other EPA programs like indoor air plus and water sense because some builders are interested in bundling these programs because consumers are interested in having all of those features in their homes we are have also updated our home energy yardstick and this would be something that you could go online you could go in and plug in your utility data for your home for the last year or so and it would give you a score from one to ten and you could then get compared with other homes like yours normalized for weather and and size and things like that from that score you may decide well gosh my house is pretty efficient or you may decide gosh my house isn't very efficient and there's information on our website which could help you improve your energy efficiency score we've also included green button functionality in our home energy yardstick which is very exciting there are a handful of utilities who are engaged in that and we're working pretty closely with them because we think that I from a consumer's perspective it'd be a lot easier to have that information downloaded quickly rather than my going in on a regular basis and updating my home energy yardstick on the building side there's a huge amount going on I don't know Carol if you had a chance to talk earlier about the states and the local governments who have mandated benchmarking and mandatory disclosure so many cities across the country have put in place laws DC has one New York City Minneapolis Boston San Francisco Seattle Philly have all of these benchmarking laws are not the same but they have requirements for benchmarking of different types of buildings some cities have focused on public buildings others have gone into commercial buildings in which they require sometimes as a transactional or an annual basis for folks to input the data on their buildings a New York City's laws pretty broad it includes multifamily housing and what they're looking for is a way to reduce greenhouse gases for those cities and they're using our portfolio manager to do that now what happens is when most people put their information in there they may be interested in how do they improve the efficiency of their programs and that's when the tools of our program may be helpful to those cities but it's also very exciting for us to help the cities in this area in some of those cities if those buildings find out that they are eligible to be labeled their buildings labeled then that's helped us in terms of expanding the you know the number of buildings which are labeled with the energy star I'm sorry I'm a little I'm losing my voice this summer we're also upgrading our portfolio manager to make it easier the system hadn't been upgraded for a while but this will be a great opportunity be easier for folks to put their data into the system and also to share data a lot of companies like to share across their portfolios so you may have a retailer who wants to be able to set up competitions across their stores and they'll be able to do that in portfolio manager because if you're running one store and somebody else is running another store you'll be able to compete in terms of how well your your stores are doing in terms of energy use we also have so much data in portfolio manager that we put out some data trends fact sheets last year and we picked data from like 2008 to 2011 and we looked at that data for 35,000 buildings and said what does it tell us what it shows us is that benchmarking works that over time as as building owners continue to benchmark they continue to improve the efficiency of their buildings we also dived into some building types like offices and K through 12 and retail to see what it tells us about that and then what does it mean in terms of labeling and what we found is that just because you label a building it doesn't mean that your efficiency needs to end a lot of times building owners continue to label year after year but on top of it their score improves which is pretty terrific from the efficiency and the greenhouse gas perspective one of the things we do in the building program is every year we do a national building competition in which we try to get building owners from around the country to compete for a year in terms of the efficiency of their buildings and it's been very exciting in 2013 2012 we had about 3,000 buildings competed and the top 15 were all at least 30% improvements of efficiency over the year we also included water tracking of that with our water sense partners and that's great because that's another resource that we want to conserve and so we have just launched our next our 2013 competition and one of the areas we want to focus on is how do we get engage tenants in in energy efficiency see what type of tools are useful to them because this is a partnership between building owners and tenants it's not one or the other how do we get everyone working together so we may be getting close to the end yes Carol's very good on keeping me on track so I wanted to say thank you to everyone for listening to me we're very proud of our program I think one of the things that makes the program so successful has been over time the metrics in the way that we've been able to measure our performance both by things like data trends but also over time for the different parts of the program and the fact that we have this of huge partnership across a D. U. S. in terms of may it might be school superintendents building owners product manufacturers and retailers and of course the American consumer so thank you so much Carol and one of the exciting things that I also thinking in terms of this 20-year anniversary of energy star which as Beth has said you know the the whole breadth of of products and services has so grown within this whole division but it's been very very interesting and exciting to look at the huge amount now of floor space in different stores or on websites in terms of looking at that energy star label which is now highly recognized across the country and where people really do see it as a very very important piece of information in terms of thinking about consumer purchases and so it's been I think very useful for us to learn a lot more and we can't it's not so easy to be good consumers and so programs like that help us be better consumers it makes it much much easier so thank you back right so make sure that you have gone or go to the EPA table and we look forward to working with you I'm so glad that you're here Beth thank you