Electric Rebate Program: Fill & Download for Free

One rebate program that is available for electric vehicles is the PG&E Rebate program if you happen to be signed up for electricity with them. They offer an $800 dollar rebate.

I'll answer my own question, after speaking with Chuck Goldman, at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab http://eetd.lbl.gov/ea/emp/staff/Goldman.html:For many years utilities have used a combination of rebates and low interest loans to subsidize the purchase of energy-efficient appliances, lights, and other energy-efficient equipment for factories. Some of these programs are general, available to all of the utilities' customers. Some are actually customized for large industrial customers.A good overview of Ratepayer- Funded Energy Efficiency in the U.S. is here:eetd.lbl.gov/ea/ems/reports/lbnl-2258e.pdfThese programs were most effective when there were a lot of new homes built, and the utility program could affect 20%+ of its customers via these rebate programs. Installing CFLs reduced electricity bill by 5-10%.Such rebate programs usually cost about 3 or 4 cents per kilowatt-hour to the utility/ratepayers, which by the way, is lower than many renewables.Then there are demand response programs, where customers agree to have the utility (or a third party) turn off some of its energy use and get paid for that.And there's a newer type of behavior-modification programs targeted at consumers, with companies such as Tendril, Opower, Efficiency 2.0 and others in this space. I just wrote about one pilot, run by Tendril, here: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703439504576116383311363522.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

In many cases, utilities have been “decoupled” by their regulators - meaning their profits are not a function of how much electricity they sell, but are based on other factors. Decoupling (utility regulation) - Wikipedia. It’s unbelievably counter-intuitive, but without that, utilities would be incentivized to sell you as much electricity as possible, and we’ve decided as a society that conserving electricity is a good thing.Decoupling alone would just make a utility neutral on your energy consumption, not encourage you to reduce your consumption. So, regulators have taken it a step further, and put in place mechanisms to encourage the utilities to get you to save electricity. These show up in the form of rebate programs for things like energy efficient appliances, and incentives for installing solar panels, etc.