WASHINGTON – The Alliance to Save Energy will present its 2019 Chairman’s Award to CPS Energy for its aggressive energy efficiency programs and the Charles H. Percy Award for Public Service to five pioneers who envisioned and created energy company efficiency programs, the organization announced Thursday.

The prizes will be presented at the Evening with the Stars of Energy Efficiency Awards Gala in Washington, D.C., on September 19, 2019, a gathering of 400 energy efficiency executives, advocates, and government officials. These Stars winners are in addition to four previously named awardees: Alabama Power, Ingersoll Rand, OhmConnect, and Pepco Holdings.

“We’re honoring the leaders who spurred decades of energy efficiency gains, together with those making aggressive energy-saving advances today,” said Alliance to Save Energy President Jason Hartke. “Without these awardees’ leadership, we’d be using and paying for more energy unnecessarily every day.”

CPS Energy was chosen by Alliance Honorary Chair Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) to receive the Chairman’s Award for its proven energy efficiency programs. Serving the San Antonio region, CPS Energy is the nation’s largest municipally owned, vertically integrated electric and natural gas company. The company’s Save for Tomorrow Energy Plan (STEP) provides financial incentives to residential and commercial customers to improve energy efficiency and use demand response. The program is on track to exceed its goal of reducing electricity demand growth from the grid by 771 megawatts from 2009 to 2020 – equivalent to the output of a coal power plant. CPS Energy will have invested almost $719 million toward the program. San Antonio is expected to ultimately reduce its electric demand by more than 800 MW, at a 15% lower cost than forecast.

Paula Gold-Williams, President and CEO of CPS Energy, said, “We’re truly honored that Senator Shaheen and the Alliance are recognizing our energy-saving work. Reducing energy demand while improving the customer experience is integral to what we do. We’re proud of the energy efficiency improvements we’ve driven and are excited about taking that progress even further.”

The Charles H. Percy Award for Public Service – presented to one or more individuals for outstanding public service in energy efficiency – will be awarded to a group of state regulators, energy company officials, efficiency advocates, and researchers who helped envision energy company efficiency programs. They sought to meet consumers’ needs to lower bills while maintaining comfort and achieve the energy companies’ needs of reducing capital requirements and increasing system utilization. The innovative solutions these leaders created provided the framework for decades of extraordinary efficiency gains. The confirmed 2019 Percy award recipients to date are:

• Dr. Marilyn Brown, Professor in Georgia Tech's School of Public Policy, who published ground-breaking research on integration of energy efficiency and demand response resources. She directed Oak Ridge National Lab’s efficiency and renewables program and was a two-term presidential appointee to TVA’s Board of Directors, where she promoted efficiency as a virtual power plant.
• Ralph Cavanagh and Kit Kennedy, of the Climate & Clean Energy Program at the Natural Resources Defense Council, who have spent a combined seven decades working with diverse energy partners to remove regulatory barriers to energy efficiency.
• Clark Gellings, who had a 33-year career at the Electric Power Research (EPRI), serving in several technical management and executive leadership roles and leading in development of the demand-side management concept and smart grid research.
• Stephen Wiel, who served as a Nevada utility commissioner and a founder and chair of the NARUC Conservation Committee, where he led early efforts on demand-side management, incentive regulation, and least-cost planning. He later served for over a decade as Energy Analysis Department Head at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab.

“Energy efficiency programs are a triple win for the environment, electric customers, and energy companies, and these leaders have made that success possible,” said Tom Kuhn, Alliance board member and president of the Edison Electric Institute. “The significant energy savings and customer benefits we see every year from energy efficiency programs are the product of years of innovative thinking and hard work. I congratulate this year’s award recipients, and thank them for their collective passion to save energy.”

Information about the Evening with the Stars of Energy Efficiency Awards Gala is available at https://www.ase.org/events/2019-evening-stars-energy-efficiency-awards-gala

About the Alliance to Save Energy

Founded in 1977, the Alliance to Save Energy is a nonprofit, bipartisan alliance of business, government, environmental and consumer leaders working to expand the economy while using less energy. Our mission is to promote energy productivity worldwide – including through energy efficiency – to achieve a stronger economy, a cleaner environment and greater energy security, affordability and reliability.

###