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‘Cash for Caulkers’ aims to make Americans greener at home
Posted on 25. Jan, 2010 by GMS Editor in Newsflash, ShowOnLatestPanel
By David Grant Correspondent / January 18, 2010
The White House and business leaders team up to craft a program to encourage energy efficient home improvements.
Josh Hewey blows in bio-based, closed-cell foam insulation in the upper floor of a Jamaica, Vt., home originally built in the 1700's. Workers with Thermal House retrofit a home to make it more energy efficient, thus reducing its carbon footprint. The Obama administration hopes to spur interest in similar work through a proposed Home Star, or 'Cash for Caulkers,' program. Melanie Stetson Freeman/Staff
The Obama administration has teamed up with green-sector entrepreneurs to craft a vision for a program that Congress could enact later this year. Officially, the plan is called Home Star, but it’s also quickly becoming known as “cash for caulkers.”
Despite its simple appeal, the plan faces a number of practical hurdles.
During a late December lunch with business leaders to discuss the proposal, President Obama asked that the end document be “simple, quick, but effective,” said Steve Cowell, CEO of Conservation Services Group in Westborough, Mass. For Mr. Cowell and other energy-saving proponents, that means grappling with two tough challenges: how to get homeowners to buy into the program and how to build a nationwide industry, complete with training and accreditation, from a disparate collection of state and local programs.
Two kinds of subsidies
To attract homeowners, Home Star will offer two tracks of incentives. The first, “Silver Star,” track subsidizes the purchase of services, like roof installation, as well as products, like efficient windows and furnaces. The incentives will be designed to get homeowners and businesses to try the program.
The second, “Gold Star,” track offers incentives tied to overall reductions in a home’s energy usage. A 20 percent reduction in energy output would be eligible for $3,500 in rebates, with each 5 percent of additional energy savings adding $1,500 in incentives. The government would fund no more than 50 percent of any project’s total cost.
Gold Star’s bigger financial incentives are aimed at getting larger energy savings, treating a home as a system rather than as disparate parts, says Matt Golden, president of a San Francisco-based home-retrofitting firm and a leading player in creating the program. “We need to make sure the investments that we’re making right now will be sustainable and will have a long-term impact.”
Organizers, while optimistic, admit they have a long way to go. For example: Even environmentally minded Vermont is struggling to increase the number of home retrofits done.
With the cost of making the average home 20 percent more efficient running between $5,000 and $10,000, only a few hundred Vermonters are retrofitting their homes in any given year. It’s “a drop in the bucket,” says Blair Hamilton, the policy director of Efficiency Vermont, a group that coordinates retrofitting activity in the state. “We haven’t broken a thousand [retrofits] a year. And we need to.”
But the small numbers speak more to the small dollars behind the project than consumers’ lagging interest in the project, advocates say. Where there are homes, says Rep. Peter Welch (D) of Vermont, there is potential demand for retrofitting and, thus, the potential for new jobs, even in remote rural areas.
