“Rural Renaissance: Revitalizing America’s Hometowns Through Clean Power” Book Excerpt
Below is a book excerpt from Chapter 5: “Energy Efficiency: The First Fuel as a First Step,” Section: Hometown Heroes (pages 82 – 86) of Rural Renaissance: Revitalizing America’s Hometowns Through Clean Power by L. Michelle Moore, published by Island Press.
In Rural Renaissance: Revitalizing America’s Hometowns Through Clean Power, Michelle Moore presents a practical and inspiring guide to revitalizing rural communities through the transformation of the energy sector to clean power. Throughout the book, she shares real-life challenges and successes and explores how to design programs that tackle inequality, showing readers how every community can build their own local clean energy future, today.
The book dives deep into the five critical components of a clean energy future, including strategies and examples for how to get started. It begins with the importance of energy efficiency as a reparative investment in housing equity before showing how renewable energy, resilience through energy storage and microgrids, and electric vehicles can strengthen communities. Finally, it illuminates the link between broadband Internet and clean energy, arguing that energy investments can be used to increase broadband access, dramatically improving rural quality of life. Each chapter profiles local heroes who are building clean energy futures in their communities, setting examples for others to follow.
In this excerpt from Chapter 5 “Energy Efficiency: The First Fuel as a First Step,” Michelle recounts the journey of hometown hero Tammy Agard. A purpose-driven entrepreneur, Tammy has pioneered the scaling of ‘pay as you save’ programs to help homeowners make their homes more energy efficient, saving money, saving power, and reducing emissions of greenhouse gasses.
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One woman’s journey is central to our story. A small businesswoman and lifelong entrepreneur, Tammy Agard was living in Montana, running a coffee roaster and flipping houses when she heard a Red Cross appeal for volunteers on the radio. It was September 2005, the Gulf Coast was reeling from the aftermath of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, and Agard knew she had to answer the call. As she shares, “It changed my life.”
Hurricanes Katrina and Rita had damaged upwards of one million homes and displaced more than one million Gulf Coast residents, more than six hundred thousand of whom were still displaced a month later. Many homes were destroyed and even more were left uninhabitable by floodwaters that contained sewage and dangerous chemicals and left behind ideal conditions for black mold when they receded.
Agard didn’t waste any time. She packed up her things, put her businesses on hold, and headed south. The Red Cross trained her and put her to work delivering meals, but it wasn’t long before her experience as a residential contractor put her on the front lines of rebuilding communities. It was now 2006, and the Bush–Clinton Katrina Relief Fund had expanded its support of disaster recovery and reconstruction. Through a program enabled by the Bush–Clinton fund, Agard worked with people who had been victimized by contractor fraud, provided case management, and got them the help they needed to stay in their homes. The physical damage didn’t surprise her, but the electricity bills did. It was not at all unusual for people to be paying $400–$500 per month to cool their homes and keep the lights on. This was not a product of Katrina, but rather the result of housing with no insulation, old and inefficient heating and cooling equipment, and air leaks equivalent to a massive hole in the side of a home. For these people, many of them seniors on fixed incomes, paying the bill to keep the lights on came at the cost of other essentials, like groceries and medicine. Subsequent research studies would show that their stories were not the exception but the rule.
It was during this time that Agard met Johnnie LaCaze, a contractor and lifelong Mississippian, who would eventually become her business partner. Their work together on the Gulf Coast would take them next to Little Rock when the Clinton Foundation brought the energy efficiency retrofit programs that had helped low- and moderate-income households in and around New Orleans back home to Arkansas. Led by Martha Jane Murray and the Clinton Climate Initiative, the HEAL (Home Energy Affordability Loan) program had been directly inspired by a program Murray and her husband launched for employees at their shoe factory in Wynne, Arkansas. An architect and longtime leader in the green building movement, Murray made completing an energy audit and retrofit on the factory a first order of business.
She wanted to make the same kinds of energy savings available to the company’s employees, so created HEAL with a forty-thousand-dollar revolving fund to offer zero-interest loans to employees for retrofitting their homes. Early program results showed energy savings averaging 30 percent, which put money back in people’s pockets by reducing their electricity bills. The program Murray pioneered to serve her colleagues was adopted by the Clinton Climate Initiative, and Agard relocated to Little Rock in 2009 to lead it.
While HEAL helped nearly 750 households cut their energy bills by a total of $625,000 per year, with Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign on the horizon, it wasn’t clear if or how the program would continue to grow. So five years later, in 2014, Agard and LaCaze founded EEtility and picked up where the HEAL program left off.
Tammy Agard and Johnnie LaCaze, cofounders of EEtility, joyfully building out their first office, 2014.
Depending on grants and loans as HEAL had wasn’t scalable, so Agard and LaCaze had to find a better way to expand access to energy efficiency. Through Dr. Holmes Hummel of Clean Energy Works, a thought leader on energy finance, they learned about Pay As You Save (PAYS), an on-bill approach to financing energy efficiency developed in Vermont. It was just what they needed. While HEAL was delivered through employers to their employees using loans, PAYS could be delivered to everyone through local utilities using utility bills.
Agard saw the potential of the PAYS model and brought it to Ouachita Electric Cooperative, a small rural utility in south central Arkansas. The result became HELP (Home Energy Lending Program) PAYS Arkansas, which in its first year helped more than two hundred households save more than sixty dollars per month on their bill on average. As Mark Cayce, Ouachita’s CEO observed, “It’s changing lives, because if you need new heating and air equipment, it’s a major purchase. It can be as expensive as buying a car. If you already have to buy a car, or do something else to your house, there’s just not enough cash to make ends meet. This program gives people the opportunity to put more money toward other things in their lives. Maybe it’s medicine, maybe it’s sending their kids to school, or something else. But it eases their burden a little bit in life.”
The eight years from post-Katrina New Orleans to Ouachita were filled with important lessons that not only shaped Agard and EEtility but also informed how communities across America are approaching energy efficiency. Moving from limited grant-funded approaches, through early experiments with loan-based initiatives like HEAL, to onbill energy efficiency programs that are paid for with savings without consumer debt represents an important evolution for the energy sector as a whole. Agard’s presence as a purpose-driven entrepreneur every step along the way was pivotal because she was able to take what she had learned and put it into practice through EEtility. Without her steady implementation, we might not have a program model that any local utility, anywhere, can implement today.
Used with permission from EEtility.
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Rural Renaissance: Revitalizing America’s Hometowns through Clean Power was published by Island Press Paperback August 16, 2022 (ISBN: 978-1-64283-196-2). It is available for sale here ($35.00). A story of power and empowerment, Rural Renaissance shows that clean energy and sustainability aren’t just an affluent, urban lifestyle. Michelle Moore offers a vision in which clean power is the spark that drives flourishing rural communities.
This excerpt is from Rural Renaissance (Chapter 5, pages 83-86) by L. Michelle Moore. Copyright © 2022 by the author. Reproduced by permission of Island Press, Washington, D.C. Book cover, historical image, and diagram provided by author. Cover photo by Sungrow EMEA on Unsplash.
About the author:
L. Michelle Moore
L. Michelle Moore is CEO of Groundswell, a nonprofit that builds community power by connecting solar, resilience, and energy efficiency with economic development, affordability, and quality of life. A social entrepreneur and former White House official with roots in rural Georgia, Michelle has been helping communities across America shape sustainable, clean energy futures for 25 years. Her accomplishments range from leading the effort to cut federal energy use by $11 billion and deploy 3.2 gigawatts of new renewable energy for President Obama, to developing innovative new clean energy programs for her hometown. Michelle was born and raised in LaGrange, Georgia, and now lives in Midlothian, Virginia, with her husband and family. Her work is rooted in her faith, and the commandment to “love your neighbor as yourself.”
About Island Press:
Island Press began with a simple idea: knowledge is power—the power to imagine a better future and find ways for getting us there. Founded in 1984, Island Press’ mission is to provide the best ideas and information to those seeking to understand and protect the environment and create solutions to its complex problems. They elevate voices of change, shine a spotlight on crucial issues, and focus attention on sustainable solutions. Their network of authors includes E.O. Wilson, Paul Ehrlich, Sylvia Earle, Gretchen Daily, Jan Gehl, Daniel Pauly, and many others. By working closely with experts like these, Island Press has developed a comprehensive and growing body of knowledge—vital resources for all those working to protect the environment and create healthy communities.
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