There was a great piece in this morning’s Arkansas Leader about a bill by Joan Cash, D-Jonesboro, that would set energy efficiency savings goals for public electric and natural gas utilities. The act would also require those utilities to develop an energy efficiency plan for meeting those goals. It sounds like a progressive bill, and it is by Arkansas standards, but the energy saving goals set forth were pretty conservative. The bill would require electric utilities to save one percent of the utility’s total annual sales in kilowatt hours based on the most recent three-year average by the year 2013. For gas utilities that figure would be .75 percent of total sales in therms. Of course, the utilities were against it and Cash pulled the bill for an “interim study,” which means she saw the writing on the walls and knew there wasn’t any point in going forward with the bill. The support would simply not be there.

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