The History of the Energy Efficiency Utility | Chris Burns

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The History of the Energy Efficiency Utility | Chris Burns

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00:15:34

Chris Burns, the Director of Energy Services at Burlington Electric Department, joins the podcast to share the fascinating history and future of the city’s Energy Efficiency Utility. Discover how BED establishes deep community trust, goes across the threshold to assist local homes and businesses, and partners with Vermont Gas to deliver unified energy solutions. Learn how strategic beneficial electrification and targeted weatherization work hand-in-hand to lower utility loads, maximize comfort, and advance Burlington’s Net Zero Energy goals.

transcript

**00:00 Jennifer Green:** Hello, Burlington and welcome to Net Zero Energy. I’m Jennifer Green, director of sustainability for the City of Burlington, where our goal is to reduce and eventually eliminate fossil fuel usage. Today, we’re really pleased to have Chris Burns with us. Chris Burns is the director of energy services here at BED and manages the city’s energy efficiency utility. It’s an amazing resource, and I bet a lot of customers don’t understand it or know what it is. And I think this is a great opportunity to tap into Chris’s thirty six years of history, not only at BED but with with the EEU. So Chris, it’s great to have you.

**00:47 Chris Burns:** Thanks for having me.

**00:48 Jennifer Green:** You know, you’re a tremendous resource here at BED and you were part of the early conversations about the formation of the EEU, the energy efficiency utility, which was sort of statewide conversation. Can you take us back in time and tell us how things evolved?

**01:05 Chris Burns:** Sure. I mean, it’s a long history. I’ll be as succinct as I can be, but you go all the way back for Burlington’s energy efficiency history. You go all the way back to nineteen eighty nine and a few years before, when the Burlington Electric Commission and the leadership of BED at the time were facing some big power contract decisions. And every utility, you’re either going to generate it yourself, own and operate, or you’re going to contract with generation plants, you know, around around New England or maybe Canada. And you, they all have big important, you know, cost decisions for our ratepayers. And the decision at the time and the conversation at the time was what role could energy efficiency play in deferring or avoiding or reducing those power contracts? And energy efficiency became part of utility regulation in least cost planning. And basically the utilities needed to prove to the regulators that energy efficiency wasn’t the lowest societal cost for the ratepayer. Instead of generating more or contracting more. And so from about nineteen ninety until two thousand and one or two, we operated our own energy efficiency programs via an eleven million dollars revenue bond that the voters overwhelmingly supported for us to begin our energy efficiency efforts. Then around the state, the regulators and others were were bringing in a model of an energy efficiency utility independent of a distribution utility, you know, like Green Mountain Power or Washington Electric Co-op. And the idea was take this least cost planning, energy efficiency, cost effectiveness kind of paradigm, give it to a state entity to go ahead and deliver those programs. BED said to the regulators, we really would like to maintain our energy efficiency programs. We think we have a solid track record over the last eleven years. We will work in concert with the new statewide entity. And that’s really that’s where we’ve been.

**03:11 Jennifer Green:** How was it selling sort of efficiency and energy efficiency to Burlingtonians at the time? Was that a new idea? Was it was it a heavy lift from a communications perspective or or not so much.

**03:23 Chris Burns:** It was. And you can imagine your electric utility, who you a lot of folks don’t know that we’re a municipal. We’re a not for profit. And it’s just they have different experiences with their utilities from wherever they’re coming from. So, you know, a lot of UVM students that are coming in renting apartments downtown. And it was a new concept and it’s, it took us a while to establish trust. And that is, we sincerely want you to use less of our product, which is a little odd, right? And we would make the argument that this is the cheapest source of power for the future. Burlington was growing. You know, we had a lot going on. You’re going to the power has to come from somewhere. You’re going to generate it. You’re going to contract for it. Or can you do things like efficiency and give yourself some room to grow? And so we we kind of were doing all three at the same time, which was a multi-pronged strategy that we think has served Burlington quite well.

**04:21 Jennifer Green:** So fast forwarding. So we had the nineties where we were running energy efficiency programs through the bond, and then there was interest at the state level of doing something for the other distribution utilities. Was there ever a conversation about sort of BED, SEU or energy efficiency work rolling into what became EVT? Or was it always very clear that BED is pretty well established in this work? So we’re going to carry on be our own energy efficiency utility.

**04:49 Chris Burns:** As I recall, it was a difficult conversation. There were folks who did not want to entities, they wanted one entity serving the state. The argument and I think it’s a solid argument. Administrative efficiency, customer and contractor confusion who serves me and BED just needed to make a persuasive argument in front of the the regulators. We needed to convince the Department of Public Service we were serious. And that efficiency was something that was in our DNA and not just, frankly, fluff. It was serious and that we had to reach a memorandum of understanding, which was a signed document. And then both parties went to the Public Utilities Commission and said, we think BED can stand alone in coordination with with this new statewide entity. The PUC agrees. They evaluate us and the other EUs EVT and Vermont gas every six years and there’s criteria. And if we don’t, if we don’t get over those those bars, we we could we could lose our EEU. So that’s, that’s how it’s set up from a regulatory framework.

**06:01 Jennifer Green:** Yeah. So Chris, talk about sort of the separation of BED SEU and efficiency Vermont. How were Burlingtonians being served? How is it working for us?

**06:12 Chris Burns:** I’m biased. And I have a lot of friends and colleagues at EVT if I were over there running programs for the entire state of Vermont other than Burlington, I may have a different view. But for Burlington, you know, we spend a lot of time on the other side of the meter, which is talk about unusual, a lot of utilities will not go across the threshold of a home or a business. They don’t have the expertise. They don’t have the will. They don’t want the liability. We spend a lot of time, in businesses and and institutions in homes. And that’s a sign that our customers do trust us. And they’re looking for good information and they want objective information. They want someone to help them think through some some thorny issues. And particularly today, affordability is a huge serious issue. I, I have to decide where am I going to put my money and where is it going to have an impact. I really wish there was somebody out there who could help guide me. And then and then I’ll throw in the other unique thing about BED being an EEU is ninety eight percent of our buildings, commercial and residential, are served by Vermont Gas. You know, that’s where the heat and. And in most buildings and the hot water, the two biggest energy drivers in most buildings, are coming from. And we just have this relationship with the energy services team that we can bring everything to the customer in one package and just explained to them their energy picture and what their steps are. And I think that’s very unique. EVT does not have the, the staffing to be as hands on. From my understanding, it’s just, it would be, it would be expensive for them to do what we do in our thirteen square miles. Right. So it’s understandable they have a different model.

**08:13 Jennifer Green:** Yeah. So we are lean and mean, but really out in the community using our resources to the best of our ability. Can we talk about your team a little bit? Chris, I know you’ve got a couple folks dedicated to working with our biggest customers in reducing their load. What does that look like?

**08:27 Chris Burns:** Yeah. So if I could show you the Energy Services org chart, you would see you would see it’s heavily weighted towards the commercial customers, but it aligns with our sales. So our commercial customers consume seventy five percent of all the kilowatt hours. So you would say, well, wait, you have three thousand five hundred roughly commercial accounts and you have almost eighteen thousand residential accounts. How can that be? Well, it’s because the residential class is made up of sixty percent renters in smaller apartments that don’t have as much stuff that we have in single family homes. Plus, back to the natural gas issue, your we don’t have a lot of electric hot water, which is a huge driver of usage. We don’t have a lot of electric heat. We’re seeing more heat pumps, but that’s so much more efficient than electric resistance heat. So we have among the lowest monthly kilowatt hour usage in New England for the residential class. And then we have this huge smattering of very big users of of electricity in our institutions city, you know, running a city, running a water, wastewater treatment plant, all those things. So, so two of the three of the positions are dealing with the largest customers to the smallest, so they can go deal with the hospital on a new chiller and in the morning, and then go deal with the retail shop on Church Street in the afternoon. And we’re just prepared to work with that group of customers. Then we have another engineer who focuses on residential and including multifamily.

**10:05 Jennifer Green:** So Chris, we’re in an interesting place because while we’ve got the EEU, you know, your team and others working to reduce load and be more efficient with electricity, we’re also strategically electrifying. Can you talk a little bit about sort of that interplay?

**10:19 Chris Burns:** It’s interesting. It’s challenging, but it’s also, you know, intriguing. We want to kind of do two things at the same time. And I would argue that you can do both. Both is a good word. And I’ll, you know, I’ll I just drove by our new Burlington High School, you know, where my, my kids went. And it’s beautiful, but it’s quite a story, and it’s a story that I think is a model for, for for your question. And that is it is one hundred percent thermal heat pumped and cooled building. So there’s, there’s wells in the ground. It’s going to come up, the water’s going to come up at, you know, fifty, fifty five degrees, and it’s going to go into highly efficient water source heat pumps. And that’s where the heating and cooling are going to come from. But the building itself is incredibly efficient, real strong attention to detail on the thermal envelope, like air leakage and insulation. It’s controlled beautifully. It’s ventilated beautifully. And the strategic beneficial electrification part of BED provided incentives to try to get them not to go to natural gas, because there’s natural gas was fueling the original Burlington High School. So we were able to influence the decision there. Then the EEU, the energy efficiency team, comes in and says, we don’t just want you to electrify this building. We want the load of the building to be as low as we can afford to build. And so two things were happening, you know, displace the fossil fuel, but do it as efficiently as you can. We have other examples of doing exactly that same thing. Most of the multifamily buildings that you’ve seen go up in the last, you know, six, seven, eight, nine years before we even have a conversation. They have already chosen heat pumps, and they’re doing that because they’ve chosen cooling. They want to offer cooling. Once you make that decision as the developer owner, you’re going to go with a heat pump. We come in and say, we want you to put in better heat pumps, more efficient, and we want you to build a better building from a from a performance energy performance perspective. That’s where the two play, where we’re challenged and Vermont is challenged. And folks may have, you know, seen that that the Department of Public Service did a study on heat pumps around Vermont. And they’re not reducing as much fossil fuel as the projections the engineering calculations would predict. And for us, we have a lot of old, beautiful buildings, but they were built when we weren’t thinking so much about good air leakage control, good insulation, and you put a heat pump in those buildings and things are not going to go well as a new building, and we need to figure that out. We need to figure out how to bundle good heat pumps thoughtfully designed along with, all right. Does the building, could the building use some weatherization? Love? And how can we help? And we have some models that we’ve been doing with Vermont Gas. This again, back to that partnership. When someone puts in, let’s say, you know, a ductless mini split system that can only do forty, fifty percent of the heating load of the house just because of the floor plan. And, and, you know, you can only put in so much, you can only afford to put in so much heat pump capacity. And if the house needs some weatherization, then BED, and VGS behind the curtain, just say, okay, let’s just call this a fifty over fifty house. It’s a it’s a dual fuel house. It needs five thousand dollars worth of weatherization. Let’s just split it. Let’s just split the going incentive and the customer is going to get something for BED and some from VGS and we all win because now we have a heat pumped older building from the turn of the century that is going to perform a lot better and put less pressure on the grid.

**13:58 Jennifer Green:** So Chris, in case listeners don’t know, you know, you’re retiring after thirty six years of BED. I mean, you are the ultimate public servant who’s been serving, serving Vermonters, serving burlingtonians specifically and working, helping to advance our climate goals by helping our city be more efficient. And I, just from the bottom of my heart, really want to thank you for your service.

**14:19 Chris Burns:** Well, I appreciate it. It’s again, I go, I’m I love sports, played a lot of it still do. And teams are. It doesn’t happen without a team.

**14:28 Jennifer Green:** So Chris, thirty six years under your belt, anything you’d like to share with customers that you think they should know that we haven’t talked about during this podcast?

**14:37 Chris Burns:** I think Vermont is lucky. I think it’s fairly unique what the utilities do. It’s it’s very unique what BED and VGS do, but it doesn’t happen without customers also embracing it. Right. We have a we have a Vermont ethic. We have a Burlington ethic about. They really, really want us to sincerely offer these programs and get, the cleanest energy, the cleanest energy mix we possibly can do and try to advance our, our climate goals as cost effectively as we can. It’s been a pleasure to serve it, serve the community.

**15:09 Jennifer Green:** Thanks, Chris. Thank you again for listening to Net Zero Energy from Burlington Electric Department. If you have any questions about this show or what ED offers regarding rebates or technical support, look for us at BurlingtonElectric.com or call us at 802-865-7300. We’re here to help you on our mutual path to net zero energy.

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