The Philadelphia Energy Authority (PEA) needed a comprehensive retrospective evaluation of its signature ten-year Philadelphia Energy Campaign as the initiative reached completion. Launched in 2016 in partnership with Philadelphia City Council, the Campaign set ambitious headline targets of mobilizing $1 billion in total investment and creating 10,000 jobs in support of energy affordability, resiliency, and sustainability across the city. PEA required a rigorous and defensible assessment of the Campaign’s cumulative economic, fiscal, and workforce impacts, alongside documentation of the environmental, community, and public-health benefits delivered by its flagship programs, to demonstrate return on public investment and inform the next phase of energy and infrastructure strategy under Mayor Cherelle Parker’s administration.
ESI conducted a multi-method retrospective analysis integrating economic modeling, fiscal impact estimation, and workforce analytics across ten years of Campaign activity. Economic and employment impacts were modeled using standard input-output practices, with year-specific multipliers applied to each annual tranche of spending to reflect evolving regional economic conditions. The analysis separately estimated two distinct job categories:
- Implementation jobs, generated by Campaign capital and operational spending
- Savings jobs, calculated using the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy (ACEEE) methodology to capture employment supported as residents and businesses re-spend money freed by lower energy bills
ESI’s analysis confirmed that the Philadelphia Energy Campaign surpassed both of its ten-year goals and equipped PEA with defensible, data-driven narrative for its post-Campaign strategy. The findings positioned PEA to demonstrate that targeted public investment in energy efficiency and infrastructure yields durable, measurable returns, directly supporting the case for continued and expanded municipal investment aligned with the Parker administration’s housing, workforce, and decarbonization priorities. The study also established Philadelphia as a national model for metropolitan climate action initiatives, providing PEA with documentation of the Campaign’s scale, equity outcomes, and replicability for peer cities and funders.