See http://www.energyfinder.org. This is a social marketing tool with lots of promise. Imagine being able to do a preliminary assessment of the energy conservation potential in your city?

About the Community Energy Opportunity Finder
Developed by energy experts at Rocky Mountain Institute, the Community Energy Opportunity Finder mimics the preliminary analysis of an expert consultant in order to help your community realize the benefits of wise energy use.

It's easy to begin. The Finder helps you collect information on your community's energy use, and then demonstrates the potential energy savings; dollar savings; reductions in carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and sulfur dioxide emissions; and job creation from energy efficiency programs. The Finder also gives you an overview of the kinds of renewable energy sources that could power your community.

Steps to using the Finder

1. Create a new account.
2. Create a scenario for your community.
3. Follow the instructions in the data entry pages to collect current and projected data on your community's energy use and physical characteristics.
4. Review your community's results.
5. Browse through the Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy pages to learn how to start and fund your own energy projects, review case studies of successful community energy programs and gather information on some of the latest energy efficient and renewable energy technologies.

Why use this tool?
A local economy might be compared to a bucket that the community would like to keep full. Business recruitment and community expansion are attempts to pour more money into the bucket. While these strategies may have succeeded in the past, today they often fail or generate more costs to the community than benefits.

Capabilities and Limitations
The Finder is designed to perform an initial evaluation of the opportunities for energy efficiency and renewable energy projects in your community.

There are many calculations and assumptions built into the Finder, based on published literature and substantial experience from dozens of energy experts.

The strength of the Finder is that it helps you collect a small core of essential data on your community's energy use, and then generates a reasonable range of your community's potential energy savings, dollar savings, emissions reductions, and job creation. In a relatively short amount of time, then, you'll be able to see how your community can benefit from energy efficiency projects, and that not doing those projects is tantamount to throwing cash out the window.

This strength is also a limitation; much of the data that drive the Finder's calculations are typical for your climate region or building type, and your community may vary somewhat from the typical case. The data generated by the Finder are intended to give you an overall sense of your community's energy opportunities, but should not serve in place of a detailed audit of each area or building where energy is used.