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"If you are not doing Energy Star, you are not being proactive in the conservation world"
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This month we are talking to ANNETTE BUBAK, President of Nevada Energy Star Partners®. As a longtime employee in sales and marketing management, Annette's passion for the industry led her to an important burgeoning cause: green home design. For the last eight years, Annette has been one of the many partners involved in Nevada Energy Star's annual marketing campaign, an initiative designed at targeting consumer awareness and branding of Energy Star brands. Though the partnership was officially made a non-profit in 2008, its success has grown tremendously over the years, letting Annette and her team focus on other ways to promote green living and conservation. She sat down with Las Vegas Green List to discuss the company's forward-thinking ventures, Nevada Energy Star's goal, its Multifamily Mid-High Rise Pilot Program and Las Vegas' influence on the rest of the nation.
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LVGL: How did you get involved in Nevada Energy Star?
Annette: I've been in the new home business for years. Back in 2001 I was a manager for a smaller home builder and during that time we were building Energy Star homes, one of a handful of builders that were constructing homes to the Energy Star standard. It was still a new concept, very new to the marketplace.
Sam Rashkin, who is the National Director of Energy Star for New Homes with Environmental Protection Agency, approached a handful of us to see if we could create what was called the coalition. The idea at the time was to pool funds. EPA pooled some of their funds, and then the different developers and then some of the supporting businesses put funds together to create a marketing campaign with the mission of increasing consumer awareness of what the Energy Star brand is and also the mission of increasing the homebuilding industry to build to Energy Star standard. It's been a volunteer [position], generally speaking most of us have worked for developers so it benefited the developer to be involved.
It's a part of me, it's a passion and obviously I have been doing it for no monetary reasons for all these years because I love it. I don't just get what's going on here [in Las Vegas], I get the global picture.
LVGL: How has the program and the marketing campaign grown since its inception in 2001?
 Annette: Back in 2001 we had five partners that jumped on board and it was just a mini marketing campaign. We were very much ahead of our times. We've gone from 17 percent awareness for consumers to 90 percent, so the Las Vegas market is leading the nation. Last year it was 67 percent penetration in the marketplace as far as new homes being built to Energy Star. We just brought on two major home builders. They finally got on board so that number is going to increase next year. Our campaigns have gone from $30,000 campaigns to $150,000.
LVGL: What does having an official Energy Star home mean?
Annette: The different aspects include that it's going to be 15 percent more efficient than what the code is. And how they get there is by creating a tight envelope, in the shell of the home, and there is minimal leakage as far as the energy. How they approach that is the way they seal the insulation, the types of windows that they use, the engineering HVAC systems, a lot of different elements, and the light fixtures and the appliances; that is how they become an Energy Star home. Those guidelines are established by the United States Environmental Protection Agency and then Nevada Energy Star Partners promote that program to the builders which has created a success. We just added American West and Richmond American who are two of our bigger builders.
LVGL: As far as the movement to green energy, products, services and companies in Vegas, where do you think our city stands in comparison to the rest of the nation?
Annette: I can speak on what we have accomplished at Energy Star. In the energy aspect, we are definitely the leaders in market penetration rate and consumer awareness. We are the role models for other markets. Our numbers are off the charts on a national average. The Nevada Energy Star Partnership has been awarded a national Sustained Excellence award for now six years straight. And that's out of 12,000 partners and we are the only partnership that has received that award consecutively for six years. So we are really proud of the example that we have been able to be rest of the nation. I get calls all the time that my colleagues back in Washington, D.C. say they want to duplicate this effort. There is just not any other market that has been able to pull together competitors by day to collaborate toward one message.
LVGL: What are the partnership's big projects for 2009?
Annette: Energy Star is now the new standard basically. If you are not doing Energy Star, you are not being proactive in the conservation world, so we went to EPA last April and asked them for the Multifamily Mid-High Rise Pilot Program. We are one of three markets right now that have the mid rise and the high rise pilot program. Basically what that means is we have taken the Energy Star guidelines to Las Vegas and established a team, which they call the Technical Support team. We are going to establish guidelines that will be adopted by the EPA for all mid rise and high rise development in similar climates. This will capture them in the planning stages.
There's also another program that's getting to roll out probably spring of next year [2009] we hope. It's a group that is strongly putting together a retro program, and the title will be Home Performance with Energy Star. That will be a retro program that those of us who own homes will be able to adopt some retro construction changes to bring them up a higher [energy efficiency] level. For the last presentation that we did, we teamed up with NV Energy, Nevada Energy Star Partners, The Climate Project and the Northwest Career and Technical Academy, a magnet academy. They are very innovative, their building is a LEED building. We will continue doing a lot of outreach this next year within the community, promoting tips on our web site, promoting our campaign theme "How Many Nevadans Does it Take to Change?".
LVGL: Tell us about the Green Alliance.
Annette: We saw a need to unite all of our efforts and to create an identity for ourselves. This year, Nevada Energy Star Partners is now a non-profit, formally. We have created the Green Alliance. We've invited all of the different organizations who have different green, conservation programs, products and services to become part of this Green Alliance. Every time we have an event, we will invite anyone in our Green Alliance to set up table tops. And then we all just start tapping into everybody's progressive ideas and actions. We've all got the same ideas so let's unite and have more impact, and that's the whole mission behind that. Being that we have advertisement opportunities, companies can pool their money again, be part of our advertisement program or not, whatever they want to do. But it makes it affordable to have one message and all of these companies behind that one message. |
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For more information on the Energy Star program, see our section:
What is our Government Doing?
For more information about Nevada Energy Star Partners recognition by the EPA:
http://www.energystar.gov/index.cfm?c=pt_awards.2008_nevada |
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