Building Technology

The House of Representatives passed the The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 yesterday, sending the stimulus package to the senate. We’ve taken a look through the bill and have pulled out the sections related to buildings, and more specifically, building retrofits. Overall, we’re pleased to see that so much attention has been paid to weatherization and buildings, and we’re excited to see how this will play out.

We will look through the senate version of the stimulus when it gets sorted out. In the meantime, you can find the full text of the house bill here, and our analysis below.

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FAS has created two energy‐efficiency proposals for a potential economic stimulus package. The first is a straightforward expansion of the DOE Weatherization Assistance Program, which has delivered significant results in carbon reduction and energy efficiency but is starved of resources. The second is a new program of grants for point‐of‐sale home energy retrofits loosely based on the Weatherization model. Including this program in a stimulus package would reduce US carbon emissions, provide green jobs in the construction industry, and increase the value of US homes. (more…)

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On Tuesday, the House of Representatives passed the Comprehensive American Energy Security and Consumer Protection Act (HR 6899). While the bill itself is very wide-reaching, unfortunately the majority of it its focus (and debate) has gotten caught up in the issue of off-shore drilling, an issue that has been shown to have little impact (immediate or long term) on our national energy use and needs.[i] While the bill did pass the house, and now moves to the Senate to be voted on, President Bush has threatened to veto the bill.

Regardless of its unfortunate focus on drilling and its apparent doom by the hand of a presidential veto, the bill does include many positive provisions for efficiency in buildings. The bill also includes the GREEN Act of 2008, a bill sponsored by Rep. Perlmuttter (D-CO), a bill that FAS helped develop. Some of the many important measures included in the bill, along with some thoughts: (more…)

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Yesterday, the Center for American Progress released a report by Dr. Robert Pollin and the University of Massachusetts Political Economy Research Institute economists titled “Green Recovery: A Program to Create Good Jobs and Start Building a Low-Carbon Economy”. The report demonstrates how a new Green Recovery program that spends $100 billion over two years would create 2 million new jobs, with a significant proportion in the struggling construction and manufacturing sectors. It is clear from this research that greening of our economy is not only possible, but it will create more jobs (and better jobs) than our current economic trajectory.

One of the central approaches to this rapid green investment in communities is a large-scale building retrofit program – one of the easiest, readily available and cost-effective approaches to reducing energy consumption. But what is exciting about this report is that it shows the details of how such a program could not only reduce residential energy use, but would also spur rapid economic development. (more…)

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The biggest news of this week is by far the government takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which places the two mortgage giants in government conservatorship. Together the two own or guarantee about $5 trillion in home loans, about half the nation’s total, and have lost $14 billion in the last year. They are likely to pile up billions more in losses until the housing market begins to recover.

The primary goal of what is the largest ever financial rescue by the U.S. Government is to restore confidence and stabilize the housing industry. However, congress should embrace a secondary opportunity in this shake-up: attacking the current energy crisis by refocusing Fannie and Freddie to embrace energy efficient mortgages. (more…)

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As convention time rolls around and the presidential election heats up, candidates will be more and more pressed for the specifics of their climate change policies. One of the most important ways of addressing climate change that should be a part of any approach is reducing energy use in residential homes. They account for over 20 percent of CO2 emissions and total energy use in the US, and a program for large-scale improvement would offer a solution that actually saves money compared to the required investment.

Current and proposed climate change policies focus primarily on setting minimum standards for new homes through building codes. The scope of energy use under consideration by cap-and-trade or carbon taxation schemes complicates inclusion of residential buildings: the emissions from one residence cannot serve as a commodity in the same market as electricity generating facilities. FAS has analyzed the possibilities for reconciling this difference, and has determined that retrofitting operations supported by utilities and included in emissions reduction mechanisms are a critical solution to the problems of energy consumption, cost, and emissions.

A system of residential energy efficiency improvements would enable cost-effective improvements financed by homeowners and utilities. Utilities would provide energy auditing services to establish the level of retrofit measures appropriate for homeowner and utility investment. Utilities are ideally situated to play a large role in retrofitting by providing low-cost energy auditing tools, up-to-date energy cost  summaries, performance data on retrofit options, and bulk purchase rates for improvements. In addition, utilities have a vested interest in retrofitting residences for energy efficiency because these improvements help utilities cope with rising demand and diminish the need for new plant construction. In order to improve residential energy efficiency and implement this policy, policymakers should consider the following recommendations as part of an overall approach to climate change mitigation:

• Climate change policy must include provisions to account for the environmental costs of inefficiency in existing residential buildings.
• National policymakers should help state public utility commissions decouple sales volume from profits, in turn providing uniform national promotion of energy efficiency.
• National policymakers should facilitate the implementation of a system of cooperative investment by homeowners and utilities in household retrofits to improve residential energy efficiency.

Read the full analysis here.

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