Good News for Homes and Jobs (Spread the Word)!
With all this talk about modifying our homes for higher energy
efficiency and savings, the Fed hasn’t really jumped on the bandwagon--until
now! Vice President Biden and the White
House Council on Environmental Quality came out with a report last week
outlining ways the government will support home retrofits for energy
efficiency. The idea is to create green
jobs, and make it easy and enticing to retrofit your home for better energy
efficiency.
Some of the main solutions in this proposal are:
-Create certifications and
standards for workers in energy retrofitting, allowing access to skilled
professionals in the field, and creating jobs.
-Make it easy to retrofit homes:
make information and tips about energy retrofitting accessible
- Make it affordable to retrofit
homes: enable special loans which, according to the report itself, “allow consumers to borrow money for home energy
retrofits from private firms at lower interest rates.” (Awesome!)
-Develop home energy benchmarks for US homes, so new and old homes can be rated for energy efficiency.
And finally,
-Enable the cost of energy-efficiency retrofits to go toward property taxes. (Wow!)
I got particularly excited about this last one because as a renter, this may be the kind of incentive I can use to get my landlord to make energy efficient changes!
I’m really hoping that the plan actually gets executed well, and that homeowners really start making use of the opportunity. Spread the word!
The report itself is found at http://www.whitehouse.gov/assets/documents/Recovery_Through_Retrofit_Final_Report.pdf