Turning Schools into Energy-Efficient Powerhouses

Jen Szaro: 0:07

Welcome back to the Energy Beat podcast. I'm Jen Zaro, your host, and today I'm psyched to talk about one of my favorite topics kids but more specifically, working with kids to reduce energy usage within their own schools. Tva has done just that with its award-winning school uplift program. Strategic energy management programs like these might take a little bit of effort to coordinate, but they create so much value for everyone involved, including school districts, faculty facilities, managers, but especially the students. I'm really blown away by the success of this particular program and I can't wait for you to hear all of the details. So let's get started.

Jen Szaro: 0:51

Today, I'm joined by Clay Hoover, senior Program Manager with TVA Energy Right. Clay is spearheading an exciting strategic energy management program called School Uplift that seeks to benefit schools in their service territory, with over 80% of that program funding going to underserved communities to date. Clay, thank you so much for joining us and thank you for being such an active member of AESP in our community. So tell us a little bit about your role at TVA and a little bit more about this program as well.

Clay Hoover, TVA: 1:23

Yeah, hey, jen, and thanks for having me today, excited to be here to talk with you about our programs here at TVA. My name is Clay Hoover. As you know, I'm an energy efficiency engineer, so I've been at this for going on 14 years now. So I went to college, got a mechanical engineering degree and then out of college I immediately fell into the energy efficiency space and I've been counting light bulbs and calculating kilowatt hours ever since. It's been a great journey.

Clay Hoover, TVA: 1:53

I've been at TVA the entirety of my professional career. I started working in our power plants, working on energy efficiency there, trying to help them be more efficient. I had a couple years where I was able to do energy engineering services for our customers, so going out and meeting all the businesses around the valley and helping them out, which was a lot of fun. And ever since then, for the past six years or so, I've been in our energy efficiency program called TVA, energy Right. So we're the traditional utility incentive type program, but with that TVA we do it a little differently.

Clay Hoover, TVA: 2:25

So a little bit about TVA, or Tennessee Valley Authority. For folks of you that don't know, we're the nation's largest nonprofit public power provider, so we serve 10 million people in the Southeast United States. We serve all of Tennessee and then West Kentucky and Mississippi, north Alabama and a sliver of all the other surrounding states. And we were created over 90 years ago as a product of the New Deal by FDR to try to help improve lives of the people of the valley. So that kind of inspiration, that mission that got us started, it still plays in how we roll out energy efficiency programs at TVA.

Jen Szaro: 3:03

Wow, that's quite a story. Yeah, I forgot that TVA was part of the New Deal. Well, you achieved your goals. You created new jobs and are doing an amazing thing with public power there so counting light bulbs and counting kilowatt hours, I like that. So you really started at the plants then and helped them improve their operational efficiency. And what made you decide that you wanted to switch over to helping customers directly?

Clay Hoover, TVA: 3:29

Yeah, I think the opportunity came up and to be able to scale. I kind of felt like in my career you could do excellent work when I was doing that in energy engineering, but you can only do so much at scale. So if you're just one person, you can only accomplish so much. I always had the feeling of there's just a never ending supply of work to do in energy efficiency. I've never been into a plant that was perfect efficiency. As far as I know, they don't exist.

Jen Szaro: 3:56

Right yeah, I've seen some clean ones, but I don't know about the most efficient. That's definitely a pretty lofty goal.

Clay Hoover, TVA: 4:04

Yeah, the job's like never done. So I just wanted to take the opportunity to try to leverage scale and provide energy efficiency help at a larger scale through more of a programmatic approach with TVA Energy right.

Jen Szaro: 4:18

We're glad you made the switch. So tell us a little bit more about this specific program, the school uplift program, and how it's having a positive impact on the community.

Clay Hoover, TVA: 4:28

Yeah. So school uplift got started. We started about four years ago here in TVA as a strategic energy management program and kind of like telling a story going back, this is pre COVID we thought we were going to create this strategic energy management cohort approach all in person, and really just try to help help schools out, get our feet into that space with SEM. And a month after we kicked off the program we got hit by COVID, as the rest of the world did, and it really forced us to rethink what we're doing, why we're doing it and how we do it. So the main thing, how that was the most immediate. We couldn't do in-person cohorts so we immediately had to go virtual.

Clay Hoover, TVA: 5:10

And then the what really kind of changed for us too. So once COVID hit, power supply needs kind of decreased. So the need for energy efficiency at the time had decreased, especially with schools more shutting down. So, kind of leaning back onto our mission to help improve lives, we'd recognize what a challenge that our schools and the service territory that we were facing and energy efficiency, just it was important but it wasn't enough. We started understanding the need and how much, how far it goes beyond just light bulbs and stuff and we really just tried to provide kind of rethink and re-inspire the way we provide the services in a way that helps the schools more than just reducing your utility costs, which is obviously important as well.

Jen Szaro: 5:56

Tell me more about that. So how are you creating additional benefit beyond just maybe saving energy and improving thermal comfort? What other aspects of the program does the community benefit from that?

Clay Hoover, TVA: 6:10

Yeah, absolutely so. Sem how we started it, we were going to engage the facilities, folks, teachers, and we really realized the greatest opportunity was like engaging the school communities a whole. So we kind of designed our own type of SEM program that we call school uplift and it's a 12 month energy efficiency engagement program where we get everyone involved, from the principals or the teachers or the kids to the facilities folks, all along a mission to save energy at the school. And how we do that, we kind of take a completely different approach to the reward, the value proposition for the school. We realized they have so much on their plate. Reducing utility bill is not enough to get them to be able to commit the time they need. So they have really important needs and every school has their own unique need. There are no one size fits all for what the need in the school is. So what we figured out, we did a customer centric design thinking and what we learned is that to get them to engage around energy efficiency we had to offer something else.

Clay Hoover, TVA: 7:09

So throughout the program, if every school then enrolls, they get at a minimum $10,000 what we call a learning environment grant. And what that is. It's a grant that they tell us what they want to spend the funding on. It can be things like you would expect, like a STEM or STEAM, stem plus art, as well as other areas of need like accessibility and equity, sustainability, health and wellness really anything that provides a positive impact on the learning experience for the student.

Clay Hoover, TVA: 7:38

It's pretty much fair game for the use of the funds and the flexibility has been key because a lot of times we'll talk with teachers and they all know what their need is, but they've got a lot of need that doesn't fit their traditional funding mechanisms. So we kind of reframe the value proposition for the school and now that we gamify it, if they save more and they engage in the program better, that grant can go up to $25,000. So we have 10. The top performers get a $25,000 grant. So it's really it excites them. They get to compete Within schools. There's a natural competitive structure that's already built into them through sports, so they all want to beat their peer schools and we kind of tapped into that. It's one of the first things we learned to this program is that's easy win right there.

Jen Szaro: 8:22

I love that concept. I think that's such a great way to get the schools excited about it, and I can just see these team mascots kind of showing up these events and cheering on the crowds. And how do the students like it? Do they also get involved in trying to find ways to save energy for the schools?

Clay Hoover, TVA: 8:40

Yeah, absolutely so. That's part of the requirements to earn a grant, as you have to get your whole student body engaged at some point. So we help with that. We provide posters and clings that will be put up throughout this school to raise awareness, especially around October Energy Awareness Month, but throughout the year they're doing engagement activities every month.

Clay Hoover, TVA: 9:01

We see some of the coolest ideas. It really a lot of it comes out of the. They create student energy teams and it gives this kids kind of authority and autonomy and their ability. It gives them the ability to kind of have their own little mission and it's amazing to see how easy kids buy into the need they are actually teaching us. We had one student at a school in North Alabama that basically we recorded on a video and she was talking about how there's no planet V and they get it. You know they understand how important energy conservation is and it's really great to see them with their. They create energy teams and they go on energy savings hunts and some schools They'll report energy waste so they'll tell on their teachers. So we see a lot, of, a lot of fun ideas with the program or engaging kids around energy efficiency.

Jen Szaro: 9:55

Oh, I've got to think the kids love that part Telling on their teachers for sure. Absolutely. Do you have a favorite of anything you've seen out there so far amongst the student teams? That just really wowed you.

Clay Hoover, TVA: 10:08

You know, kids are creative. They don't have like boundaries as much as you know we do as an adult. So, like we, we saw one that cracks me up is there's a girl. She was a probably like middle school age and she was into, I guess, like arts and acting and stuff. She created a video it's a hard knock, life saving energy to to an old like R&B song from the 90s. So I was surprised she even knew about that.

Jen Szaro: 10:31

But it was hilarious.

Clay Hoover, TVA: 10:33

Yeah, wow, and it did what it needed to do. It engaged, you know, people in a fun way around energy efficiency.

Jen Szaro: 10:40

I love that. It's a hard knock life. That was a great, great tune. That's really cool stuff. I love how you've really pulled together the entire community to really help achieve and champion this effort. And what have been your success to date with this. Like, how, how are you seeing a change in energy savings for these schools and behaviors, maybe?

Clay Hoover, TVA: 11:00

Yeah, yeah. So I think the expectation, or the industry you know standard for SCM programs in school, typically we shoot for three to 5% and that's what we would have been happy with with this program. Right, and to keep that in mind, like we've targeted schools and underserved communities, because when we designed the program that was one of the key things is we didn't want to provide another offering that if you're in an underserved community where you have more constraints on staffing and resources, that you're automatically not going to have time to participate. So we had to kind of design the program in a way that everyone can be included, and so that's an extra challenge if the teachers and such have just so much on their plate. But yeah, so 5% would have been great.

Clay Hoover, TVA: 11:39

But program to date we've worked with 118 schools and we're in our fourth year now. We've almost doubled or tripled our size every year and a program to date we're saving right at 10% energy savings and that's over a 12 month period. And that's you know we use. We use energy startup portfolio manager as kind of like our regression modeling tool. That way the schools will have it when we're done. So that's like normalized energy savings and it's just amazing to see that like twice what we expected in terms of savings. And we think it's because we figured out, like what motivates them with these grants and with the competition and stuff and the engagement, and they're just outperforming our expectations. So what that means. So 10% energy saving, that's over $8,000, annual energy reduction per school and we expect them to save that for at least five years. So you know that investment saving 40,000 in energy that can be reinvested into what the schools are there to do, which is educating the future, the kids. It's really exciting.

Jen Szaro: 12:40

Yeah, that's fantastic. That is really remarkable to hear that. So is it a mixture of behavior-based and low-cost opportunities for upgrades or things like that? Like what's the program?

Clay Hoover, TVA: 12:54

Yeah, absolutely so we would automatically take out anything that we would incentivize for energy efficiency. So these are all low and no-cost behavior modifications and changes the way they operate their buildings. So, yeah, this is just turning stuff off For the most part. You know, we engage facilities folks, the facilities maintenance professionals around best practices, but we think a lot of the savings is coming from just awareness and engagement, just turning things off that are unneeded. It's just amazing the opportunity there.

Jen Szaro: 13:27

Wow, that's all I can say. Wow, those are great numbers. I don't think I've heard numbers like that, especially for a schools program that is primarily behavioral-based changes. That's phenomenal. You mentioned the facilities folks. How do they feel about this? Are they a key stakeholder for you in this process?

Clay Hoover, TVA: 13:46

Yeah, so we originally designed the program as having facilities, folks being the prime audience, and what we quickly learned is you can take a program to scale throughout the school. It takes a lot of the burden off of them.

Clay Hoover, TVA: 13:57

So, instead of them, you know monitoring behavior and making sure people are shutting doors and turning things off. We've kind of empowered the whole school to do that, and it enables them to spend their time doing what they do best, you know maintaining systems, working on equipment, things like that. So it's been more of a natural adoption instead of just adding work to people that are already at their hands full.

Jen Szaro: 14:21

That's kind of feel great, too, to be supported by the entire school in your initiatives.

Clay Hoover, TVA: 14:25

Absolutely. We love the opportunity to you know, highlight the work that they do and give them an opportunity to, kind of like, be supported by their school. That's a lot of fun.

Jen Szaro: 14:35

So for others. How did you pull together your partnerships and your key stakeholders to create this program from the design standpoint and then from the implementation standpoint?

Clay Hoover, TVA: 14:46

Yes, that's a great question because partnerships were super important. So TV is kind of talked about our inception a little bit. We're really unique power company and we were able to do programs like this is because of our local power company partners. So we've got 153 companies that we partner with as the end-use distributors for power, for schools, and it's because of that unique partnership that we have, where we're all in alignment of a mission of service. So it gives us opportunities to try out programs like this.

Clay Hoover, TVA: 15:17

So most important or first partnership it starts with is our local power companies. And taking that even farther, first group we partnered with is our utility program implementation firm. So we use our implementer here is TRC and we actually built the skills to deliver SEM in-house. For other programs we might bring in a third party expert from across the country who's really good at this. We knew we wanted to do this program unique and different.

Clay Hoover, TVA: 15:47

So we kind of all took a fresh approach. So we all learned how to implement this ourselves. So it kind of gave us a fresh perspective of not knowing years of best practices and just learning on your own. So they've been a great partner. We've learned how we hire coaches, we go through teachers and that's kind of a best practice. And another great partner that we started with from day one was within Tennessee there's energy efficient schools initiative within the Department of Education at the state level and they have a mission of saving energy in the schools through a revolving loan fund and they had interest in this behavioral energy savings as well. So they've been a great partner unlocking, you know, opening doors with school directors, really helping us get our start. It was a little tougher to get started because this is a completely new space for us, but they've been an amazing partner and I'm sure there's a number more than I'm probably forgetting.

Jen Szaro: 16:43

I feel terrible, but no Well, who would you say was the hardest stakeholder to get buy-in from Anyone? Stand out that you would say like you had to do things differently or try different approaches.

Clay Hoover, TVA: 16:55

I think the hardest to get buy-in was early on with the directors and the superintendents in school. I mean here we call them directors of school, superintendents, whatever, but because they're you know, they're laser focused on educating students and this is kind of a little bit to the side of that and really just trying to understand the value proposition to them was new to me. And eventually we got our first cohort filled. But it took me and the representative from the state of Tennessee, the energy program, to like travel to their offices, sit down in front of them and then sell the program to them. We even did a little competition with them. We would sit down and say, hey, the school next to you, the director next door in the other county, they agreed to join the program.

Clay Hoover, TVA: 17:37

So you know, kind of a little peer pressure and a healthy way to get them to join, but whatever it took, so yeah, that was tough, because they've got a, they've got laser focus on their mission as well.

Jen Szaro: 17:49

I think that's so important that you took the steps to do some customer centric design thinking and thought about the value proposition for each of the stakeholders. For me, that's a key takeaway for sure for the how you design the program.

Clay Hoover, TVA: 18:03

Oh, absolutely yeah, and that was after our first cohort. So we had to completely change the program after year one to understand how to grow it.

Jen Szaro: 18:13

Did you have any pushback internally that were people pretty receptive to allowing you the flexibility to change based on your experiences and learnings?

Clay Hoover, TVA: 18:22

Yeah, the timing of it was really good because the grants that go along with the program are really unique, especially to the utility efficiency space.

Clay Hoover, TVA: 18:30

But TVA for a while has had a very serious focus on trying to alleviate the energy burden that a lot of our members are a lot of our customers face. If you think about it, we're here in the Southeast US. We've got really hot summers right now it's like 90 something outside cold winters and relatively low income. So what that creates is a high energy burden, not directly because of our rates, because we have some of the lowest rates in the country, but we still wanted to see what we could do to help. We've designed programs like school uplift. So leadership at TVA has a focus from our board down to helping address some of these issues. This program was like an answer to how do we do that in the school space. Similar, we have a home uplift program that helps residential customers through like grants to upgrade their homes. So we've got thankfully, leadership was fully supportive of that new direction that you talked about kind of that change, those grants that we added on.

Jen Szaro: 19:28

I love it. I love that it touches pretty much every part of your community ecosystem with benefits. So that's so lovely to hear that it was so well thought out and you've got participation throughout the entire chain of stakeholders. But you've got that buy-in as well, which is so nice. And you're right, it's so challenging when you have communities that bear a bigger energy burden. With the crazy hot summers we're having right now, it's more and more important that we help with that energy burden, so that's just incredible. Well, last question for you, then Lots of great ideas here. So I'm curious what are your let's say, your top two things for someone considering replicating your success with this program which they absolutely do and maybe two things that you think you learned? Probably don't do these two things when you're trying to launch your program.

Clay Hoover, TVA: 20:26

Yeah, no, I think you already hit on one of them, like the ones that you do is customer-centric design thinking, whatever you want to call it. So talk to your customers. Talk to them about energy efficiency and try to understand what would motivate them and what their needs are beyond that. So it's amazing, like we had no idea we would be providing grants to improve learning environments as a way to achieve energy efficiency, but it turns out it works really well. So now we try to do that as we design programs. I'm working on one for hospitals right now and we did the same approach. We brought in the customers and talked with them. It's amazing how much that helps success, I would say.

Clay Hoover, TVA: 21:02

Another one is just how you recruit. Like we've recruited teachers to be our energy coaches and we've been very specific about who we sell the program to. So originally it was like directors and such, and they would volunteer someone to be the energy champion, like a teacher. But what we've found is that we try to go find the teachers to be our champions, the ones that already care about energy efficiency. So it's something they'll naturally want to do. So when we recruit, we partner with, like, the state of Tennessee Office of Energy Programs. They have an energy camp for teachers, so that's a perfect place. So that's where we try to recruit for customers that naturally care about energy efficiency, and then they can help carry the torch within the school per se and then-.

Jen Szaro: 21:50

I totally get that. I mean, I was gonna say so. There's nothing worse than being voluntary to do something. It's really hard to get buy-in. So I love the idea that you're making it geared towards teachers that already want to do this and care about this, and is that like an application process for them?

Clay Hoover, TVA: 22:07

Not as much of an application process. It's just like how we find them. We still, in order to enroll in the program, you have to identify your energy champion at the front end and you also have to get top management support, which is like the hallmarks of SEM as leadership commitment. So we've done that. But we also have to identify who's gonna do the work on the front end. So that was all an effort to reduce the dropout rate. So right now we're working with 123 schools per year. So that's like a lot of recruitment and we wanted to make sure we were working with the schools that are gonna succeed, with the right people.

Jen Szaro: 22:46

So one pitfall I'm hearing is definitely don't volunteer people.

Clay Hoover, TVA: 22:49

We'll wait for another one, do you? Another one is don't start an engagement program right before COVID. That is one.

Jen Szaro: 22:58

Yeah.

Clay Hoover, TVA: 22:59

A pitfall is just scalability. I think Along that line is if you do all in person, it prohibits you from scaling. That's what we thought we were going to do, but because of the constraints that COVID put on engagement, it forced this to go all virtual and now we can scale up to what we never dreamed Working with 120-something schools every year For a program team of like five. That's a lot, and it's because we've become efficient and scaled in a way that's more virtual, but we still go in every school. We still send engineers out to all of them. Another one is just don't limit yourself by the way you design in person versus virtual.

Jen Szaro: 23:42

Okay, I love that. Tell me more.

Clay Hoover, TVA: 23:44

Yeah, it's just like what we were saying here with if it was all in person. You're constrained by geography. You can only hit so many schools, and we knew we want to provide a program that was open for the whole valley. We know we serve seven states. I think that the virtual option has been a huge help.

Jen Szaro: 24:04

Wow, this has really been a great conversation. So many successes to take away from this. What comes next now? What are you going to plan to do next with all of this? I feel like you're going to create all of these little energy engineers and energy professionals out there for us, for the next generation. So how do you top this?

Clay Hoover, TVA: 24:22

Yeah, I don't know. I don't know how you top this. I think that one of the things that we do is to try to streamline the program, try to make it as cost-effective as possible, bring in more partners to help address the need, because on the facility side the infrastructure within schools there's a lot of need but thankfully there's a lot of grants coming out. We just won one from DOE for a school in Mississippi through the program. So yeah, that, and then taking what we've learned and trying to reflect it in other programs. So we already have a unique inspiration on our industrial customer side where they can reinvest savings into the community. And then we took our design thinking approach to hospitals and we're going to roll out. I don't think nothing is innovative. I guess is this for hospitals, but yeah, really something that they need. So we're excited to just continue to listen to our customers and try to help them where they're at.

Jen Szaro: 25:14

I love that approach. Well, clay, I just want to thank you for joining us today and sharing these incredible insights from what is a very successful strategic energy management program, and thank you for being an AESP member. Tva has been such a great member with us and there's so much to take away and learn from all the work you're doing. If listeners want to learn more, please check out the episode description for a link to the TVA School Uplift program. Thanks so much for listening and, clay, thank you so much for being with us today.

Clay Hoover, TVA: 25:45

Yeah, and Jen, thank you as well. We appreciate the AESP and the work you all do to help provide a platform to share like best practices. So thanks so much.

Jen Szaro: 26:16

Thank you you.