In an interview with State Affairs, Hadley provided some tips for residents hoping to cut back on their energy usage (and lower their bills), and he described new federal and state programs that can help pick up the costs. 

The conversation is edited for clarity, brevity and length.

Q. How can people lower their electric bills this winter?

A. The usage is the primary factor for energy bills. A lot of our programs are geared toward helping customers manage their usage. I like to often say the cheapest kilowatt is the one you never consume.
Folks right now could take some steps to ensure that if there's any leaky doors, or drafty windows, to seal those as best they can. Maintaining your thermostat at a little lower level than maybe what you normally would will also help. Weather is a really big factor in energy usage and energy bills. Obviously, the hotter it is or the colder it is, the more energy you're going to use because your system is running more.

Q. How can people know which appliances are using too much electricity? 

A. A really good logo that hopefully most people are familiar with is the Energy Star program. Whenever you're looking at a new appliance, look for that Energy Star logo. That means that it is a highly efficient appliance. Usually your biggest energy suckers in a home are going to be your HVAC system, water heater, washer and dryer.

Q. How do our individual decisions on efficiency affect the electric grid?

A. We're seeing a lot of new technologies and innovative technologies that require either interconnection with the electric grid, or it's just more stuff that folks are going to be plugging in at home in their outlets. And so that is going to require energy. The electric system itself is built to serve that peak load. So if we grow that peak load with more things being plugged in — and all that being plugged in at once — the utilities will have to build their infrastructure to meet that peak demand. So the more that we can reduce that need for investment in new infrastructure, and the more that customers can spread out that load over the period of a day, the less likely utilities will need to invest more money and more infrastructure to meet new demand.

Q. What are some of the ways that your office helps local communities?

A. We actually funded a few communities just earlier this year through our base funding to help them with energy security planning at the community level. In addition to that, we received $9.5 million through the U.S. State Energy Program. And as part of that, we plan to allocate a significant portion to develop holistic community energy grants. That will be coming likely next year: Essentially, providing a competitive solicitation process where communities can holistically think about energy in their community, and then share their plan with the Office of Energy Development. And these will be high dollar awards in the amount of somewhere like half a million to a million dollars per award. We intend to be quite broad, because we don't want to tell communities how to use these funds. We want the communities to tell us how they want to use them.

The second program that I would talk about directly for communities is the Energy Efficiency and Conservation Block Grant program. There was funding allocated to it under the Bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. Indiana received a $2.4 million formula allocation. I believe there was another $4 million that was allocated to about 37 Indiana cities and towns directly from the federal government. The purpose really is for local units of government to upgrade their public buildings: doing retrofits, energy efficiency work, solar panels, whatever the communities may want to do with that. We're going to disperse 60% of the allocation that the state received to communities through a competitive solicitation process — and only to the smaller communities that did not receive formula allocations from the federal government. So we want to hit those that are not big enough to receive that federal allocation.

We want a statewide impact for all these programs. These are federal taxpayer dollars at the end of the day, Hoosiers paid into them and so we want to make sure that we reinvest these dollars back home in Indiana, and across the state.

Q. How else will you use that $9.5 million?

A. We submitted our application to the federal government for the Energy Efficiency Revolving Loan Fund. The remainder of that money — which is roughly around $6.2 million or so — we're going to be partnering with financial institutions around the state to provide an opportunity for customers to finance larger energy efficiency investments through a lower-than-market interest rate. This helps customers who may not be able to just pay right out of pocket for a new HVAC system that they need. 

It'll require an energy audit. Energy audits are typically given through utility programs, and we also plan to have a list of qualified energy auditors that they could choose from as well as part of our program. So if the energy audit comes back and says these investments will save you money over the life of that asset, then those would be eligible for investment by this program. What we don't want to do is invest in or have folks finance equipment, that they don't see a return on investment and that the asset will have to be replaced before they would actually be paying off that loan. We are targeting roughly the second quarter of next year.

Q. What else should Hoosiers know about the influx of federal funding?

A. Indiana was allocated $182 million in the Home Energy Rebate Program. And the purpose is to upgrade homes, both the infrastructure and then also providing rebates and discounts for folks to purchase energy efficient appliances. So that's a significant amount of money that's coming to the state. 

We have submitted what we call an early application that allows us to receive a little bit of the administrative funds so that we can build our capacity here internally, and then design and develop those programs to be ready to operationalize and deliver to the state. So that's going to take some time. They're very complex programs. But we hope that the programs will be ready sometime in the middle of next year, that folks can take advantage of to help them with retrofits to their home, and then also to purchase energy efficient appliances.

Q. Is there anything else people should know?

A. There's a lot of opportunity. We encourage folks to visit our website regularly. We have a listserv where folks can sign up for email notifications on all of these programs. You know, a lot of these programs are not yet developed. We're in the process of building them and so we really hope 2024 is going to be the year that most of these programs become available for customers to participate.

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