When he speaks today at Pennsylvania State University, President Obama is going to talk about initiatives to make buildings more energy efficient.

The director of the SEDA-Council of Governments’ Energy Resource Center said folks in the Valley should read that as “jobs.”

“We’re keeping things local and having the region become a hub for energy expertise,” Stacy Richards said.

Richards is a member of an advisory committee helping to steer the Greater Philadelphia Innovation Cluster for Energy Efficient Buildings, based out of Penn State. That cluster — a group of private businesses, government and academic institutions — is an Energy Innovation Hub created by the U.S. Department of Energy.

The hubs are spread across the nation and focused on moving the country forward on development of green and sustainable technology.

And part of that is training people to teach skills needed to build things like solar panels, Richards said.

The president’s goal, as stated in his State of the Union speech last week, is to have America become the world leader in such technologies. He noted that, like the Russians in the space race, other nations have outpaced America in the green industry.

“I’m looking forward to what the president is going to talk about — this is a ‘Sputnik’ moment,” Richards said. “We can do more with our growing expertise in this field. This could turn our manufacturing base around. It could create jobs while helping everybody use less energy.”

Already there are some local industries working in the field on their own, she said, and they are joining the cluster.

One of them is Larson Design Group, which is based in Williamsport and has an office in Selinsgrove.

Company President and CEO Keith Kuzio said the firm is a partner in the cluster but has not delved into projects yet.

“The energy market is a growing market for the country,” he said. “From that perspective, we’re interested in getting involved to learn about the dynamics of it, to focus our efforts around certain competencies we have.”

The company already has several engineers and designers who focus on energy conservation and auditing, green building and design, and the development of natural gas from Marcellus Shale — viewed by some as a stepping stone to energy independence and a move toward more renewable sources.

To Kuzio, it’s a good sign the president is touting his energy-efficient building initiative at Penn State. Getting it off the ground will translate into local jobs, he said.

“Look around the world,” he said. “In the countries that are ahead of us in innovation in the energy area and sustainability, the governments of those countries realized early on that they needed to subsidize some of those activities to get them off the ground.”

Today, the president is expected to talk in depth about his goal to make commercial building space in the United States 20 percent more energy efficient through cost-effective upgrades by 2020.

”By making buildings more energy efficient, we will save business owners money by reducing their energy bills by about $40 billion at today’s prices,” a news release from the White House said. “That money that can be put to better use hiring more workers, inventing new products and creating shareholder value.”

Obama has a five-point plan created after consulting with business and industry leaders:

— Reforming the tax code to provide better tax incentives for businesses to retrofit their facilities and make them more energy efficient.

— Providing more financing to loosen up the ability for businesses — especially small businesses — to get retrofitting projects done.

— Creating a competitive “Race to Green” grant program that provides incentives for state and municipal governments to streamline regulations that would attract private businesses to retrofit their buildings or build new green buildings.

— Issuing the “Better Buildings Challenge,” where CEOs and university presidents would become leaders in building designs that use sustainable or green technologies, aimed at saving them money and improving productivity.

— Training the next generation of commercial building technology workers, bringing the nation’s youth along to compete with the rest of the world.

It is this last point on which Richards and SEDA-COG’s Energy Resource Center is most focused.

“We must be teaching our children in school now about how to use and create new technologies that will be our answer in the future,” she said. “Even the schools we build and how we build them, not only will they be healthier for students and cost less to run, but they’ll also be teaching tools.”

But the best part about the strategy, if it comes to fruition, is jobs, she said.

“These are new jobs,” she said. “They’re local. They can’t be exported and they actually have value because they help people save money.”

For more on the Greater Philadelphia Innovation Cluster for Energy Efficient Buildings, visit gpichub.org.