  Various many-body perturbation theory techniques for calculating electron
behavior rely on {\it W}, the screened Coulomb interaction. Computing {\it W}
requires complete knowledge of the dielectric response of the electronic
system, and the fidelity of the calculated dielectric response limits the
reliability of predicted electronic and structural properties. As a
simplification, calculations often begin with the random-phase approximation
(RPA). However, even RPA calculations are costly and scale poorly, typically as
$N^4$ ($N$ representing the system size). A local approach has been shown to be
efficient while maintaining accuracy for screening core-level excitations
[Ultramicroscopy {\bf 106}, 986 (2006)]. We extend this method to valence-level
excitations. We present improvements to the accuracy and execution of this
scheme, including reconstruction of the all-electron character of the
pseudopotential-based wave functions, improved $N^2\log N$ scaling, and a
parallelized implementation. We discuss applications to Bethe-Salpeter equation
(BSE) calculations of core and valence spectroscopies.
