As the sustainability movement builds momentum, more funding resources are becoming available for renewable energy and energy efficiency. The challenge is keeping track of all of the opportunities from the federal government as well as state level opportunities, which vary from state to state. There is a great solution to this challenge in the form of the Database of State Incentives for Renewables and Efficiency or DSIRE for short. DSIRE is a web site that tracks down sustainability incentives throughout the 50 United States and provides the basic program details and a link to the provider’s website. The DSIRE home page displays an interactive map of the U.S., and by selecting a particular state, a list of financial incentives available within that state is provided. For example, if you want to find out what corporate energy savings tax credits are available in Indiana, just click on Indiana. If you also want to explore federal opportunities, click the American flag to find everything you need to know about federal incentives.
DSIRE began in 1995 at North Carolina State University as a service of the North Carolina Solar Center. Its modest goal was to provide a list of state policies throughout the nation on business, government, industry and public renewable energy incentives. By gathering information from all across the nation and organizing a publicly available database, the Solar Center accomplished its first goal. Only a decade later, the site had a hefty load of 25,000 monthly users.
That would have been respectable in its own right. However, in late 2005, DSIRE received a $430,000 grant to expand its scope to include energy efficiency incentives. This grant was awarded by the State Technology Advancement Collaborative (STAC), a joint effort between the National Association of State Energy Officials (NASEO), the Association of State Energy Research and Technology Transfer Institutions (ASERTTI), and the U.S. Department of Energy. The STAC’s mission, to collect funding and expertise across state boundaries to aid energy innovation, lined up with the DSIRE expanding its scope to include energy efficiency incentives.
What did DSIRE do with $430,000? First on the agenda: change the name but preserve the acronym. To communicate DSIRE’s broadened focus the full name was modified to “Database of State Incentives for Renewables and Efficiency”. It seems like a small change, but since adding coverage of efficiency incentives, DSIRE has multiplied its user base nearly ten-fold, from 25,000 in 2005 to 240,000 today.
Adding the efficiency portion of the site not only exponentially increased use, but the site’s content exploded as well. The number of policies DSIRE tracks has gone from 699 to 2,353 policies today. The STAC grant pushed DSIRE along its original path, but it also helped it develop a service for businesses and industries that require many ways of striving toward a sustainable future.
The STAC funding for DSIRE has expired, but the success of DSIRE’s efficiency database has allowed it to renew its contract with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, meaning the database continues to serve as one of the most important resources for the sustainability movement and is a key indicator of its growing vitality. Users come from all sectors. Public officials utilize its PowerPoint-ready slides for presentations, nonprofits find important updates about state incentive policies and grant programs, and energy departments of companies large and small take advantage of it’s rapidly-updated resources to find ways of enhancing the sustainability component of their business. As if there weren’t already enough reasons to go green, DSIRE makes it easy to find the available federal and state incentives that are available.
