financing
-
Municipal Energy Financing is Expanding: Is It Working?
Twenty states now allow cities and counties to finance energy efficiency retrofits and on-site renewable energy generation, with property owners repaying the loan with a property tax assessment. Five municipalities launched Property Assessed Clean Energy (PACE) programs in the past two years and these programs have spent $37.5 million to help enable close to 2,000 […]
-
Property Assessed Clean Energy (PACE) makes partners of solar PV and energy efficiency
Property Assessed Clean Energy (PACE) does not make energy efficiency the enemy of solar PV. Instead, it helps optimize the use of solar PV for participating property owners. PACE programs are a new tool for promoting residential (and commercial) energy efficiency improvements and on-site renewable energy. The municipality issues bonds to provide financing for voluntary […]
-
How innovative financing is changing energy in America
Property Assessed Clean Energy, or PACE, has taken off like wildfire since the concept was first introduced in Berkeley, Calif. in October ’07. PACE allows private property owners to pay for energy efficiency and renewable energy projects through an addition to their property tax bill, overcoming the high upfront costs that prevent most property owners […]
-
Seasonal Greetings: Lumps of Coal for Blackstone and JPMorgan Chase CEOs
From Bruce Nilles, director of Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal Campaign. This post was co-written by Tim Wagner of Resource Media Nearly a year after the Bush administration left office, we’re still dealing with one of their fossil fuel legacies: an attempt to burden our economy and our climate with over 150 new dirty coal-fired power […]
-
Merkley counsels Obama on how to make ‘cash for caulkers’ work
In his much-anticipated jobs speech last week, Obama introduced a program meant to encourage energy efficiency retrofits for residential housing; it has since become known as “cash for caulkers.” On Tuesday, Obama will host a discussion at a Washington-area Home Depot focusing on the economic benefits of retrofits and soliciting ideas for how such a […]
-
Fair, ambitious & binding: Essentials for a successful climate deal
Working in a coalition of roughly 500 organizations from nearly 80 countries can be tough. With so many different points of view and unique perspectives and expertise, coming to agreement on something as complex as solving climate change can be difficult to say the least. But then again, isn't that what we're asking over 180 countries to do next month in Copenhagen?
-
Making buildings more efficient: rationalizing retrofit markets
As I said in my last post, taking energy efficiency in buildings seriously means expanding our policy horizons beyond the blunt tool of raising energy prices. We have to think in creative ways about how to remove market and behavioral failures that inhibit cost-effective responses to today’s energy prices. How can we make efficiency markets […]
-
‘Subprime carbon’: Risk or hype?
On the announcement that the Clean Energy Jobs (CEJ) bill cleared a key Senate committee last week, Friends of the Earth complained: The bill’s backbone is a poorly regulated carbon trading scheme that entrusts the Wall Street bankers who brought us the current economic crisis with the responsibility to solve global warming. Sheesh. Of course, […]
-
China is leaving the U.S. in the dust as it surges ahead on clean energy
Even as China overtakes the U.S. in the dubious category of “world’s leading greenhouse gas producer,” it is also well ahead of the U.S. in developing the technologies and policies to solve the problem — and selling those solutions to us at massive profits which could have been ours. On a recent trip, I saw […]