The Environmental Law Institute is undertaking a major research effort to locate and create legal and administrative means for encouraging energy conservation at the state and local level. The research, funded for an 18-month period by a $498,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, will employ four Institute attorneys, an economist, and a manager to direct a search for legal materials and structures that mandate or encourage energy conservation, as well as those that presently stand as impediments to efficient energy usage.

During the spring of 1975, the Institute will ask law schools in six states to coordinate student research directed at discovering legal materials which may, both in obvious and in indirect or unlikely ways, affect energy use patterns. The states chosen for intensive study—Florida, Ohio, Oregon, Texas, Vermont, and Wisconsin—are considered a representative cross-section of the nation as a whole, in light of their diversity in density of population, weather, and economic base. It is therefore expected that the student research, which will be supplemented by a data collection effort on the part of the Institute, should uncover most of the existing legal and administrative structures and methods that control or affect energy usage.