History and Purpose of the Energy Coordinating Agency

Summary

Jared

Micah and I got into talking very deeply about the importance of vocational training, making sure that we have a really strong green collar economy and workforce to deploy as this industry continues to grow.You had mentioned that you were in charge and working at ECA, the. Energy Coordinating Agency. Maybe you can speak a little bit to what that is so that folks listening that aren’t familiar. 

Liz

Oh, sure. I founded ECA back in the mid-eighties. It’s the largest provider of residential energy conservation and efficiency services in the state to be frank. And most of its work is under contract to government and utilities for low-income customers. So ECA has been weatherizing and providing a full range of energy efficiency services for low income people for about 35, almost 35 years.

It also coordinates all of the low-income energy services in the city through a network of community-based organizations that we call Neighborhood Energy Centers. And there are 14 of them now all over the city. So it’s a one-stop shop approach to low-income energy services. There’s so many low-income energy programs that customers don’t even necessarily know what’s out there, so they go to a neighborhood energy center and get everything they need. So it’s a very coordinated delivery system in low-income neighborhoods. And we set that up over 30 years ago, and it’s just really been flourishing in the city. The centers serve more than 15,000 customers and the ECA produces work on a very large scale.

The ECA has gotten more and more technically proficient and adept as time’s gone on, and frankly is technically very savvy. The quality of the work is really wonderful. And in order to produce very high quality work, you have to have very high quality technicians and so training our own staff. During the era of the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act, during that era, we were able to open public training center and we started off training for energy efficiency. And then because the demand for solar training is so high in Pennsylvania and our region, we got into solar training quite a few years ago as well. And ECA trains in stormwater management and some other sustainability practices as well.

And all of these are very complimentary, so we find that it really helps for a worker starting out in this clean energy and new economy to be cross trained, to have an understanding of energy efficiency, even if what they want to do is solar so that they’re not working on one technology in isolation.

So the solar training that’s going on now, Spencer Wright, who actually is the head of training for Solar States has been a fabulous anchor for that training for solar at ECA and he’s just been great. I think it’s probably still the case that the graduates of the solar training program, almost 100% of them find jobs in the field.

And I hope that they can start finding jobs closer to home. Many of them have to leave the Philly area because Pennsylvania has been, on a policy level, I would say very backward. So we’ve been training workers who find jobs in New York or New Jersey or Maryland or other surrounding states because the industries are all growing faster in our neighboring area. But hopefully we can turn that around and these workers can find jobs at home.