The day before the 40th Earth Day, VP Joe Biden kicked off a series of White House actions and announcements with an excellent initiative:
selection of 25 communities for up to $452 million in Recovery Act funding to “ramp-up” energy efficiency building retrofits. Under the Department of Energy’s Retrofit Ramp-Up initiative, communities, governments, private sector companies and non-profit organizations will work together on pioneering and innovative programs for concentrated and broad-based retrofits of neighborhoods and towns – and eventually entire states. These partnerships will support large-scale retrofits and make energy efficiency accessible to hundreds of thousands of homeowners and businesses. The models created through this program are expected to save households and businesses about a $100 million annually in utility bills, while leveraging private sector resources, to create what funding recipients estimate at about 30,000 jobs across the country during the next three years.
This is, truly, a terrific announcement: the movement of real funding into paths for ramping up energy efficiency building retrofitting capacities and actions.
Sadly, however, it is only a fraction of already stated demand and a miniscule fraction of what we should be doing.
For that $452 million investment, there looks to be the likelihood of over 20% annual return on investment at a borrowed money cost of roughly 5% (or less), that provides a real profit potential for the taxpayer. And, this program will create some 30,000 jobs (or 90,000 job years).
“For forty years, Earth Day has focused on transforming the way we use energy and reducing our dependence on fossil fuel – but this year, because of the historic clean energy investments in the Recovery Act, we’re poised to make greater strides than ever in building a nationwide clean energy economy,” said Vice President Biden. “This investment in some of the most innovative energy-efficiency projects across the country will not only help homeowners and businesses make cost-cutting retrofit improvements, but also create jobs right here in America.”
“This initiative will help overcome the barriers to making energy efficiency easy and accessible to all – inconvenience, lack of information, and lack of financing,” said Energy Secretary Steven Chu. “Block by block, neighborhood by neighborhood, we will make our communities more energy efficient and help families save money. At the same time, we’ll create thousands of jobs and strengthen our economy.”
Building energy efficiency is one of the greatest win-win-win options for the nation right now: job creation in some of the hardest hit industries (building trades), opportunities for every single community in the nation, very high fiscal payback opportunities, and a real bang for the buck in reducing the nation’s carbon footprint.
The biggest problem with this announcement is simple: 25 communities with, roughly, $150 million per year. As an example of the problem,
Overall, the program funding was eight times oversubscribed, with more than $3.5 billion in applications received for the just over $450 million in Recovery Act funds available, indicating significant demand for investment in energy-saving and job-creating projects like these nationwide.
This type of program shouldn’t be in 25 communities, but in 2500+. The annual investment shouldn’t be $150 million, but easily $15+ billion (actually, multiples even of that figure).
Let’s be clear, this $452 million is far from the only money that the Federal government is putting toward local community building efficiency. Even so, the total national investment falls far short of the massive opportunities for economic stimulus, strengthening of state & local financial situations, and a leap forward in reducing US GHG emissions that a serious program could foster.
It is past time for a massive Federal bond support program to help state and local governments move out aggressively with energy efficiency efforts. It is past time for a Federal program to buy down mortgage loans on the basis of energy efficiency. The $100s of billions in energy savings and 10s of millions of jobs that an aggressive embrace of such a path would foster are sitting there waiting to be harvested.
Again, cheers for the Obama Administration’s efforts and this announcement.
Let us hope that an announcement of a truly robust program will come before the 80th Earth Day … or, more importantly, before the 41st.
1 comments
as it’s called is kind of retarded. In this downsizing of everything corporate decided to locate the HVAC controls in another building making average office temps about 50 on the coldest days of the winter.
Smart Grid is the infrastructure for energy rationing plain and simple.
And Ya I am an engineer and do have 22 years of giving people technology and then watching them fuck it all up.