Building Technology

On Tuesday, President Obama signed the $787 Billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act into law. The act is estimated to save three and a half million jobs over the next two years.

We’ve kept an eye on it through its development, and I want to give an update as to what made it out the other side and into law. My comments on building related portions are below. A more inclusive evaluation of the stimulus’s green measures by the Alliance to Save Energy can be found here and here.

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The House and Senate came to an agreement on a final, compromised version of the stimulus package yesterday. As of this afternoon, the final language hasn’t been released yet, so I dont know the specifics as to what made the final cut, and what funding levels will be. Once the language gets released I’ll post an update with some thoughts.

Stay tuned…

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President Obama held his first prime-time press conference yesterday, fielding questions focusing on the current economic crisis and the bailout currently being debated on capitol hill.  Responding to a question on finding bipartisan solutions in the bailout, President Obama continued to support the idea of energy-efficient retrofits as a means of job creation and economic stimulus:

“This is another concern that I’ve had in some of the arguments that I’m hearing. When people suggest that what a waste of money to make federal buildings more energy-efficient — why would that be a waste of money? We’re creating jobs immediately by retrofitting these buildings or weatherizing 2 million Americans’ homes, as was called for in the package. So that right there creates economic stimulus, and we are saving taxpayers, when it comes to federal buildings, potentially $2 billion. In the case of homeowners, they will see more money in their pockets. And we’re reducing our dependence on foreign oil in the Middle East. Why wouldn’t we want to make that kind of investment?”

I couldn’t agree more.

The full text of President Obama’s press conference is available here.

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It looks like we’re not the only ones seeing the value in home energy retrofits as a means of reducing energy use and CO2 emmissions, as well as a way of creating jobs. The UK is set to announce a plan to offer a complete “eco-makeover” for one in four homes. The campaign will involve providing roughly 7 million houses a complete retrofit to improve insulation. Householders could also be encouraged to install small-scale renewable and low-carbon heating systems such as solar panels and wood-burning boilers. Details of the program have not been announced yet, but it is expected to be voluntary, possibly through loans that can be paid back over 25 years from the expected savings on energy bills.

Read more about the announcement here.

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In an interview with CBS’s Katie Couric on Wednesday, President Obama was asked about spending measures in the House version of the stimulus package that have been criticized by Sen. Mitch McConnell and others, including $6.2 Billion for the Weatherization Assistance Program. President Obama makes the case for the weatherization program as a means to jump start the economy by creating jobs immediately, saying “We’re going to weatherize homes, that immediately puts people back to work and we’re going to train people who are out of work, including young people, to do the weatherization. As a consequence of weatherization, our energy bills go down and we reduce our dependence on foreign oil. What would be a more effective stimulus package than that?”

The President is correct.

As a paper by the Federation of American Scientists demonstrates, the Weatherization Program is the longest running, and perhaps the most successful US Energy Efficiency Program. The program, which underwrites a portion of the cost for improving the energy efficiency of low-income homes, reduces heating costs by an average of 31 percent, resulting in significantly lower energy bills that are so important in trying economic times like these. The program also creates roughly 52 jobs for every $1 million of federal investment. The stimulus package’s investment of $6.2 Billion into the Weatherization program will result in roughly 300,000 jobs created.

The program carries a great potential to alleviate both the economic and energy woes our country currently faces. Investing in weatherization through the stimulus bill also provides the opportunity to create a more modern, streamlined and effective system for improving residential energy efficiency in the future. To do so, and to ensure the best use of stimulus funds, the weatherization program needs to improve the software tool that weatherization centers use to determine which retrofits are cost-effective, upgrade and standardize the training for energy auditors and weatherization crews, and start collecting data from the field about the real energy savings and costs of different weatherization measures to continuously improve the program.

FAS applauds President Obama and the members of congress for recognizing the potential of the Weatherization Program, and we look forward to seeing this potential realized.

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I was directed to this article written by Katie Fehrenbacher in Business Weekly. I think it highlights a lot of the points we’ve been discussing about the Weatherization program in the stimulus, and its certainly worth a read.

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Looking at the numbers pulled out from yesterday’s post, there are a few things I want to note.

First of all, the amount of money being put into building retrofits is pretty astounding. Just under 35 billion is included in the house stimulus package that is strictly for retrofitting and renovating buildings. This isn’t all solely for energy-efficiency measures, but much of it is. This includes money to the DOE Weatherization Assistance Program, money for the US General Services Administration to improve energy efficiency of federal buildings, grants to improve the energy efficiency of HUD subsidized housing for the elderly, disabled, and for Section 8, and for improving schools and institutions of higher education.

All of this is really exciting, but it also creates an astounding puzzle: how to ramp up these programs to such enormous levels quickly and effectively. For example, the Weatherization Assistance Program was allocated $227.2 Million last year. There is a national framework and a network of state and local agencies already in place, and allowances per building have been doubled, but absorbing roughly 25 times the amount of money will be a dramatic challenge.  A national framework for training and certification, as well as some sort of national database to expedite the process of analyzing and retrofitting buildings to the full cost-effective level. FAS is currently putting together thoughts on this, and I’ll have more on this shortly.

Another important point to note is tucked into the section on State Energy Program grants. The bill allocates $3.4 Billion to state energy programs, but allows money beyond normal allocations to be distributed only to states that have “decoupled” utility profits from sales in their regulation. This allows for utilities to profit from energy efficiency, rather than strictly from producing more energy, and it has been shown to be an important tool in energy reductions. It appears as though this was Rep. Waxman’s doing, and a more in depth account can be found here.

In addition to being tied to decoupling, these state energy program grants are to be given to states where the residential building code is equivalent or better than the 2009 International Energy Conservation Code (and for commercial buildings, ASHRAE 90.1-2007). This is also encouraging. There are two halves to improving the national building stock through building codes: improving the codes themselves, and then getting municipalities to adopt them. Hopefully this carrot will help push states towards these improved codes.

Its unclear what of this will emerge in the final version of the stimulus, and I’ll be keeping an eye and adding more thoughts as things happen.

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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. Read the rest of this entry »

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Today, the Structural Insulated Panel Association (SIPA) published a story in their quarterly newsletter about  FAS’s presentation at the 2008 ASCE AEI Conference. More information about the conference and presentations, including pdf files of the presentations, can be found here.

You can sign up for the newsletter here, and more information about SIPA can be found on their website at www.sips.org

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