Building Technology

I want to share a recently published paper by John Millhone, senior advisor to the FAS Building Technologies Program. John authored a paper for FAS recounting the history of the Weatherization Assistance Program, as well as recommendations for future actions, which can be found here.

John is currently a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in the Carnegie Energy and Climate Program. He is currently evaluating and commenting on U.S. energy policies and focusing on clean energy and economic stimulus initiatives. He is also providing analysis to the U.S.–China provincial and municipal energy efficiency management program for the Carnegie Endowment.

John’s paper for the Carnegie Endowment examines if the massive increase in funding for the Weatherization Assistance Program can be spent well, or if it is simply money thrown at a “feel-good program”.  According to the paper, the answer to this question will “depend on the ability to successfully complete three tasks:

1. Accelerate the administration of the program, including bringing together a federal, state, local, and private sector implementation structurewith transparent monitoring and verification of the results.
2. Secure the support and participation of stakeholders with an interest in the success of the program, not only because their support is essential,particularly in the southern states, but also to build confidence in the directionof the stimulus package.
3. Translate the federal stimulus investment into a self-sustaining,ongoing activity that relies on other funding sources and is recognized as vital in meeting long-term national goals.”

John analyzes each of these three tasks, discussing the potential problems and opportunities associated with each, and he provides recommendations for successfully accomplishing each. The full paper, which I highly suggest reading, can be found here.

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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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.

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. (more…)