The Local Role for Promoting Energy Efficient Homes and Businesses

One of the most cost-effective ways to fight climate change is to make homes and businesses more energy efficient. Yet this is also one of the most difficult goals to achieve. In UC Berkeley and UCLA Law’s 2010 report “Saving Energy,” we found the key barriers to be the highly individualized nature of retrofitting buildings (given their diverse form, age, and conditions), owners’ reluctance or inability to provide the up front cash for the work, and the hassle of hiring an energy auditor, a contractor, and then having a property worked on, among others.

In the video below, Cisco DeVries, president of Renewable Funding, discusses local government policies to help property owners save energy. Cisco was the brains behind the Property Assessed Clean Energy (PACE) program, the promising local financing mechanism for retrofits that, while temporarily on hold for many residential properties, is still going for commercial buildings. He also describes the need for marketing energy upgrades to building owners, as done in California by the state’s Energy Upgrade California program. You can see Cisco and learn more about this topic at UC Berkeley and UCLA Law’s upcoming “Local, Clean & Green Conference” at UC Berkeley on December 2nd. Registration and agenda can be found here (including for the simulcast).

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VDN4aq1FJr8&w=560&h=315]

energy efficiency, home retrofits, local government, PACE