Tools and Resources

The Cash Flow Opportunity Calculator helps inform strategic decisions about financing energy efficiency projects. This document provides an explanation of the calculations and methodology at work behind the calculator.

The Cash Flow Opportunity Calculator helps inform strategic decisions about financing energy efficiency projects. Using the tool, you will be able to estimate how much new equipment you can finance using anticipated savings, as well whether you should finance now or wait for a lower interest rate. Use the CFO Calculator to get answers to critical questions, such as:

Learn how Des Moines Public Schools, a school district with more than 32,000 students and 70 facilities encompassing almost six million square feet of space, was able to improve its facilities and maximize energy savings by financing energy efficiency improvements through revenue bonds.

This two-page primer provides an overview of two of the most popular mechanisms for financing energy efficiency projects in the public sector: performance contracts and tax-exempt lease-purchase agreements. Both mechanisms provide effective alternatives to traditional debt financing, and both may allow you to pay for energy efficiency upgrades by using money that is already set aside in your utility operating budget – allowing you to draw on dollars saved from future energy bills to pay for new, energy-efficient equipment and projects today.

The Building Upgrade Manual is a comprehensive guide to profitable energy efficiency upgrades presented in an easy-to-understand framework designed especially for ENERGY STAR partners.

This 12-page chapter addresses:

• Analytic conventions
• Cash-flow analysis tools
• Selecting an analysis tool
• The investment analysis process
• Other considerations

Use this 14-page PDF to learn how to integrate publicly available, no-cost ENERGY STAR tools into the energy performance contracting process in order to make performance contracting projects more actionable and understandable for building owners, tenants, policy makers, and the public.

This 19-page primer is designed to establish best practices for energy service companies (ESCOs) that are implementing energy performance contract (EPC) projects by integrating several publicly available Web-based ENERGY STAR tools that the U.S. EPA has designed and provides free-of-charge through ENERGY STAR. EPA believes that the use of these tools will help make the results of EPC projects more actionable and understandable to building owners, tenants, policy makers, and the general public.