This morning I attended the second meeting in a month of the Sustainable Energy Utility (SEU) Oversight Board. The big news that came out of this meeting was that a final contract had been negotiated with Applied Energy to be the Contract Administrator. The CA is responsible for the actual work of the SEU. The allocate resources for promoting energy savings through a series of energy saving initiatives. The Fiscal Agent is currently going through the selection process, they manage the money.
I talked about the selection of the CA a few weeks ago. Since then, the Delaware Energy Office has been in negotiations with Applied Energy to finalize the actual contract. Last night they finally settled on the contract.
In computers there are sometimes parts of a program that we call Easter Eggs. They are small, hidden parts of code that when you do the right thing to activate them, they do something unexpected, and often fun. One example is that Microsoft Word used to have a little animated movie that showed all of the names of the Word programmers. The Easter Eggs in the CA contract are equally fun.
There is exactly one human being named in the contract. This human is a $120/hr consultant with the Transportation Management Authority by the name of Roger Roy. So, of 21 named positions, only one actually has a name next to it with 40 hours budgeted for his services. For those of you playing along at home, Mr. Roy is a former legislator who promoted the TMA in legislation, then left Leg Hall to become its only employee.
Perhaps more interesting to me was the revelation that there has been a pilot program in place for over a year to weatherize low-income homes in Wilmington. The idea is to help weatherize the homes of the participants and to pay back the costs of those improvements through “shared savings.” Essentially, if the homes save $500/year due to weatherization, $250 would go to pay for the weatherization and $250 would be realized savings by the participant. Once the costs have been paid off, the participant gets all of the savings.
Great idea, huh? Guess which Wilmington non-profit is the SEU’s partner. Peoples Settlement. Sen. McDowell was asked about this and he assured us that there was no money going to People’s Settlement. This is a good thing, since there have been accounting irregularities alleged by the State Auditor and there is a great deal of accounting wizardry that must be employed in this pilot program. I intend to dig a little deeper on this issue.
My final concern about the SEU this time is that we are just now getting to the Contract Administrator. Months ago (before the election) I asked why the RFP for the CA had to be rushed before the new Oversight Board could be seated by the Governor. The response was that they wanted to get the CA in place so that they could be ready for the beginning of the winter and start saving energy right away. Needless to say, with the first day of spring tomorrow, we have our first failure.