Building Technology

Construction has begun!

FAS is partnering with the Citizen League for Environmental Action NOW (CLEAN), an environmentally conscious community organization in Houston, Texas, to build a home to demonstrate the use of structural insulated panel construction. The home uses fiber cement board faced SIP panels with expanded polystyrene cores. These panels passed rigorous test requirements established by the International Code Council (ICC), which dictates standards for building in the United States, as well as additional tests conducted by FAS that looked at structural and fire safety under extreme conditions.

And now, after extensive designing and planning, construction has started!

I’ll be posting pictures here periodically and providing a running commentary on the construction process as the house takes shape. Photos of foundation prep and the first walls going up can be found after the jump…

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The Weatherization Assistance Program Technical Assistance Center has a great page of information about ramp up capacity and planning for the program to handle the $5 Billion on its way from the stimulus bill. The page contains information about ramp up capacities, workforce scenarios and projected workers needed, and impacts and savings.

While there is still a lot of planning to be done, this page is a great insight into a lot of the discussions that have already been happening.

Read more here.

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…

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.

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.

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.

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.