blog

Posts Tagged ‘CNT Energy’

CMAP goes retro

Wednesday, April 21st, 2010

The Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning (CMAP) was just awarded $25 million to help carry out energy-efficient retrofits to commercial and residential buildings in northeastern Illinois, and our colleagues at CNT Energy played a major role in authoring the original proposal. Big-time congrats to the Center for Neighborhood Technology!

Excerpted from the White House’s media release:

Vice President Biden will today kick off five days of Administration events around the 40th anniversary of Earth Day with the announcement of the selection of 25 communities for up to $452 million in Recovery Act funding to “ramp-up” energy efficiency building retrofits. Under the Department of Energy’s Retrofit Ramp-Up initiative, communities, governments, private sector companies and non-profit organizations will work together on pioneering and innovative programs for concentrated and broad-based retrofits of neighborhoods and towns – and eventually entire states. These partnerships will support large-scale retrofits and make energy efficiency accessible to hundreds of thousands of homeowners and businesses. The models created through this program are expected to save households and businesses about a $100 million annually in utility bills, while leveraging private sector resources, to create what funding recipients estimate at about 30,000 jobs across the country during the next three years.

Energy-saving solidarity

Friday, January 15th, 2010

Minneapolis-St. Paul’s Star-Tribune gives some love this week to HOURCAR, our fellow regional non-profit car-sharing pals in the Twin Cities.

HOURCAR is a more modestly scaled endeavor than I-GO, but they’ve quietly been making steady progress in introducing Minnesotans to car sharing. And we share a lot in common with them. HOURCAR was launched by the St. Paul non-profit org Neighborhood Energy Connection (NEC), which pursues many of the same aims as CNT Energy, a division of the Center for Neighborhood Technology (CNT), the non-profit which launched I-GO in 2002. Both help consumers obtain information and services they need to control energy costs and reduce their carbon footprint.

And if you’re an I-GO member traveling to the Twin Cities, you can join HOURCAR for free!

And then there’s CUB Energy Saver, a multi-pronged initiative of the Illinois non-profit Citizens Utility Board that helps local residents save money on bills, manage energy use, and team up with friends and neighbors to make their communities more energy-efficient. The CUB Energy Saver site is a pretty cool social-media-styled online app that lets you configure and monitor your energy use, join groups, write blog posts, get updates on events, and more. It’s very well designed, we must say. Kudos to CUB on this one. We encourage you to check it out for yourself. When you sign up (for free), they’ll even send you a free compact fluorescent light bulb.