Little-Known Agency Slashing Fed Gov’t Energy, CO2. Tools You Can Use Too

The Federal Government is the nation’s largest energy consumer, due in part to its massive portfolio of over 350,000 buildings, encompassing over 3 billion square feet in the U.S. and around the world. A little-known, 51-year-old federal agency called the Federal Energy Management Program, or FEMP, is tasked with helping reduce the energy and carbon footprints of all those buildings.

FEMP functions as internal consultants to about 30 federal agencies, providing expertise, strategic consulting, technical assistance and funding upon request to help the agencies manage their buildings, Anna J. Siefken, Deputy Director of FEMP detailed In an exclusive interview on Electric Ladies Podcast. FEMP is now part of the Office of Infrastructure in the Department of Energy, one of many new “offices” the Biden Administration created.

FEMP’s vast collection of tools, trainings, and best practices are also available to the public to help reduce the carbon footprint of all buildings, and homes, too.

Since its inception in 1975, FEMP has helped reduce the federal government’s carbon footprint by 50%, according to the FEMP website. President Biden’s Executive Order 14057 set a goal of having federal buildings be net zero by 2045, and cut 50% from 2005 levels by 2032. It also set forth the Federal Building Performance Standard that “sets the goal of zero Scope 1 emissions, from onsite fossil fuel use, in 30% of the agencies federal buildings by fiscal year 30,” Siefken said. The plan to achieve these goals is called the Federal Sustainability Plan, which they say is also designed to spur growth in American clean energy industries and jobs.

Here’s how FEMP works and how the public can benefit and learn from them, from our discussion:

· What does FEMP do? The FEMP website describes what they as, “FEMP works with its stakeholders to enable federal agencies to meet energy-related goals, identify affordable solutions, facilitate public-private partnerships, and provide energy leadership to the country by identifying government best practices.” The strategies need to be replicable, too.

· FEMP provides policy, planning, technical support and funding: “What we do is we work with this entire portfolio of buildings of the federal government, as you mentioned, about 350,000 buildings, also including 600,000 cars and trucks in the fleet, all of them looking towards decarbonization,” Siefken explained. “We do it through policy and planning,” analyzing energy mandates and strategizing with agencies “to identify the short and long-term opportunities and how they can sort of make the case for themselves to save money and to meet these higher goals.” They also provide technical assistance to execute, optimize and prioritize the strategies, as well as with maintenance and funding when appropriate.

· 40,000 to 50,000 hours of training per year and 63 tools on their website: ”People make all of that happen, and so the training that we do, which is somewhere around between 40 and 50,000 hours of training a year,” she said. It’s both online and in-person, including a big in-person event “where we bring thousands of federal procurement officers together, and they all learn about the same things that we would learn at a climate conference for commercial buildings or in industry,” she said.

FEMP’s tools can be found by searching Federal Energy Management Tools. “I found 63 tools that are available, and it’s everything from a climate smart building initiative planning tool, to a climate action planning tool, building lifecycle cost calculators, energy escalation rate calculators, facility energy decision systems, existing building, commissioning decision tools, technical resilience navigator, I mean, there’s just this treasure trove and it’s all on our website,” Siefken said.

· Shifting how people make these decisions, “train the trainers”: “We talk about the importance of decarbonization and what that means and how you can get there. ‘What are the decision points that someone can have in their position so that they can make those decisions?’ ” A key piece of their training, Siefken emphasized, is shifting how these decisions are made. “Everyone in, whether you’re in business or making a decision about your household or, working for the federal government, your thought is, ‘how can I save money? How can I make things more efficient?’” and addressing repairs. “So, we help them sort of train the trainer so that we’re bringing up a pipeline of people who can do these different energy conservation measures at federal agencies in those buildings.”

· They collaborate with the private sector through “performance contracting”: “A performance contract is like a public private partnership,” Siefken explained. It’s a structure that enables agencies to leverage pre-vetted energy service companies (aka ESCOs), to provide technical services across the country. The company is paid in part through the cost savings that result from their work. It’s “basically third-party financing of that energy conservation measure to extend it over a longer period of time, so that the company is incentivized to do energy conservation measures that work best for that agency or that building or that campus, because they pay themselves back with the energy savings over many years. In fact, sometimes as long as 20 or 25 (years).”

· Ensuring communities benefit from FEMP initiatives, including previously disadvantaged ones: A FEMP grant program called Assisting Federal Facilities with Energy Conservation Technologies, aka AFFECT, supports how their initiatives help the local economy, They have “awarded 31 projects across 18 states for 11 agencies,” with a focus on how the community benefits.” Siefken said, “Because as soon as you put an influx of funding around a building, I mean, think about when you’re working on a building and you’re trying to do energy conservation measures. There’s supply chain, there’s the workers who do the work, there’s the people who make the decisions, there’s the architects, the engineers, there’s a whole lot of economic activity that happens around any one of those grants.”

“What we all know is that historically energy has been generated, created, in ways that disproportionately impact communities who haven’t had a say,” Siefken pointed out. “And so, the entire Office of Infrastructure has been really focused on how can we right some of those wrongs with some of the funding that we’re sending.”

Listen to the full interview with Anna J. Siefken on Electric Ladies Podcast here.