BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM
An impressive $14.7 million from the city. $1.3 billion in economic investment returned. $1.4 billion in energy savings. 11,000 jobs created. Those are the results of the Philadelphia Energy Campaign’s first decade, according to a 10-year economic impact report released last month.
The financing model that made this possible
Emily Schapira, president and CEO of the Philadelphia Energy Authority (PEA), describes the core approach as stacking. “The stacking and layering of different types of funding is really the unique thing that’s happening in Philadelphia that I think is not the norm,” she says. “We’re able to blend private financing with a little bit of public or a little bit of philanthropy and turn that into something that everybody can use. That’s the model.”
Two tools have been central to that stack. Commercial Property Assessed Clean Energy, known as C-PACE, lets property owners finance energy upgrades through a voluntary property tax bill assessment; roughly $400 million in C-PACE financing supported 22 projects and produced $29.9 million in municipal tax revenue. The Philadelphia Green Capital Corp., a nonprofit green bank PEA launched in 2021, provides low-cost financing for efficiency and renewable projects, giving the model a vehicle for blending dollars that would otherwise stay separate.
Programs that delivered the numbers
More than 130,000 LED street lights were installed. The Philadelphia Museum of Art cut electricity use by 28 percent through efficiency upgrades. Built to Last, a program that aggregates available funding to help low-income homeowners access repair and energy programs, has reached more than 400 households, delivering an estimated $300 to $1,000 in annual savings each.
Solarize Greater Philadelphia helped more than 4,300 homeowners install solar, more than half of them low-income, adding 25 megawatts to the grid. A water and sewer line protection program reduces the energy the water department spends on pumping and treating water lost through leaky pipes.
What political support accomplished
The campaign launched in 2016 with backing from Philadelphia City Council President Darrell Clarke, who assembled a coalition of labor, school officials, and community organizations. Schapira is direct about what that unlocked. “Having that political encouragement, even though it didn’t come with a lot of money, really made all the difference,” she says. “It opened a lot of doors. It got different parts of government, like our housing authority and our transit authority and our school district and folks who don’t always get to work together in productive ways, to really open their minds to it.”
Schapira calls the early strategy a Jenga approach: “just tapping the blocks to see which ones come loose.” Projects were chosen based on what was moveable, not what looked most ambitious.
Built without depending on federal dollars
The campaign launched during the first Trump administration, when federal clean energy funding was not a safe assumption. That starting condition shaped the entire design. The loss of a $156 million Solar for All grant has been painful, but Schapira says resilience was built in from the start. “We really designed everything around models that are very flexible and able to take advantage of opportunities when they come.”
Philadelphia sustainability director Elizabeth Lankenau distills the wider lesson. “We’re all moving the needle in our own way,” she says. “So, let’s just keep doing what we’re doing and focus on what we can change.” Across ten years, Philadelphia changed quite a lot.
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