EcoMotion was on the original AB 811 program design team in Palm Desert. Once the bill was signed as an urgency measure by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, Palm Desert raced to roll out the first program nationally for what has become known as PACE. Working with the City and its leaders and lawyers, EcoMotion drafted the program guidelines, provided cash-flow analyses for prototypical measure retrofits, and provided comprehensive marketing and administrative support services for what the City called its Energy Independence Program. Through no-upfront cost, positive cash- flow retrofits – carefully managed for each interested citizen – the program demonstrated the potential for widespread energy, cost, and carbon savings. Its design and initial City seed funding of $5 million was approved unanimously by Council.

Shortly after launching the AB 811 program in Palm Desert, EcoMotion took AB 811 north to Sonoma County. The County sought a “search and replacement strategy” for the Palm Desert guidelines, to use the same program design and name. EcoMotion’s job was to present the program – from concept to execution—and then to guide its rollout in Sonoma, buttressed with $100 million in funding thanks to shared investment between the Sonoma County Water Agency and the County Treasury pool. The design challenge was to create a zero net cost program for Sonoma County in two years. Within a year, Sonoma’s PACE program was the largest in America by an order of magnitude.

EcoMotion hosted two PACE Solutions conferences in partnership with the City of Palm Desert and the University of California Riverside, Palm Desert Campus in 2009 and 2010. The conferences were national in scope and attendance, attracting leaders in PACE from Berkeley to Boulder, Vermont to D.C. and beyond. For each conference, EcoMotion arranged speakers, venue, logistics, served as Master of Ceremonies, hosted socials, and facilitated plenary sessions.

One of the most interesting implementation experiences tackled by EcoMotion’s Ted Flanigan was in the Philippines. His charge was to design and implement the Efficient Lighting Initiative there on behalf of the International Finance Corporation, a branch of The World Bank. “ELI” was being implemented in seven countries worldwide. IFC managers considered implementing the Philippines project to be a major challenge. Through a deliberate process involving local stakeholders and developing a local capability, the project was rolled out with fanfare and then success thanks to program design that involved utility performance incentive mechanisms – and a utility, business, and government partnership. In addition to upgrading standards, introducing performance contracting to the country, an exciting aspect of the project was using the country’s leading comedian – Michael V – as the people’s spokesman. This including shrink-wrapping Michael’s beloved face on buses in Manila!

In 2014, EcoMotion completed an 18-month, comprehensive climate action planning process for seven of its member jurisdictions within the Coachella Valley. For the cities of Blythe, Cathedral City, Desert Hot Springs, Indian Wells, Palm Springs, Rancho Mirage, and the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians, our team prepared detailed greenhouse gas inventories. We then worked with city/tribal leaders and community members to present customized mitigation strategies. The planning process involved research and outreach to hundreds of organizations and local government employees and leaders. Ultimately, the inventories that clearly laid out each jurisdiction’s CO2e emissions, and their plans which provided roadmaps to achieve 1990 CO2e levels, were adopted by their respective councils.

Concurrently, EcoMotion completed seven Energy Action Plans (EAPs) for these cities. The plans present detailed information on energy usage and energy costs within each City. They also present the results of walk-through energy assessments of each municipal building performed by EcoMotion experts – including police and fire stations – with prioritized retrofit opportunities. The EAPs cover electricity, natural gas, and transportation fuel use.

In 2014, EcoMotion completed a greenhouse gas inventory and sustainability planning process for the City of Brea. The City is to be commended for having already taken many steps to mitigate its footprint. With this inventory and strategy, Brea took sustainability to the next level through community input and analysis of mitigation measures necessary to reach statewide carbon dioxide reduction goals. EcoMotion also helped Brea officials craft a Sustainability Plan in the form of the Sustainability Element for the City’s next General Plan update.

Indio is located in the in the Coachella Valley, 23 miles east of Palm Springs, and 98 miles north of Mexicali, Baja California on the U.S.-Mexican border. The word Indio is Spanish for Indian. Known as “the city of festivals,” each year Indio hosts major festivals like Coachella and Stagecoach.

In 2014, EcoMotion completed a greenhouse gas inventory for the City of Indio. Like several other Coachella Valley cities, its growth has made its climate action planning al the more important and challenging: Its census population grew from 49,116 in 2000 to 76,036 in 2010, an increase of 55%.

In 2010, EcoMotion completed a greenhouse gas inventory for the City of Palm Desert, California and an accompanying Sustainability Action Plan. The planning process involved interviews and group meetings with nearly 100 stakeholders to discuss areas of City interest including land use, water, transportation, material management, air quality, the built environment, and energy. EcoMotion’s municipal action decision-making tool used five selection parameters to rank mitigation measures, and the first 20 measures were unanimously accepted by City Council to get the process started.

Most challenging was the fact that the City’s emissions had doubled since 1990. So had its population, and more development was planned.  EcoMotion worked with staff and Council there to recalibrate the Council’s prior goal of 7% below 1990 by 2020, and to extend the timeline from 2020 to 2030. Since the Plan was developed, Palm Desert spearheaded was is now PACE, and engaged with Southern California Edison and Southern California Gas in a program to reduce the City’s energy use by 30% across the board. With concentrated efforts, plus significant solar installations in Palm Desert, by 2013 the City’s footprint has already been trimmed by over 100,000 metric tons per year.

The earliest greenhouse gas inventories were developed in the early 1990s by the Urban CO2 Reduction Project. Ted Flanigan served as a consultant to the Urban Carbon Dioxide Project in the early 1990s. The project was managed by the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives in Toronto, a spin-off of United Nations activity. In that capacity, he and other consultants travelled to and worked with European and North American cities to develop greenhouse gas inventories and then plans to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. Data on current and projected energy consumption was gathered – for cities from Copenhagen, Denmark and to Portland, Oregon – and then analyzed. Then sector-by-sector approaches were recommended to cut CO₂ emissions. Concurrently, the project was cultivating stakeholder and political support such that plans became policies, and targets went live.