Establishing a solid foundation for a self-sustaining home energy efficiency retrofit industry has recently emerged as a key component of the White House’s ongoing economic stimulus and climate change mitigation strategy. According to a presidential advisory committee, growing this market would jump start the construction industry and help get its nearly 17 percent unemployed experienced workers back on the job.
On December 4, the President’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board (PERAB)—a committee of private sector investors—voiced its support of a home efficiency retrofit program called “Home Star.” (Download PERAB’s memo here.) Popularly nicknamed “cash for caulkers,” the program was developed by a broad-based group of stakeholders and was proposed by venture capitalist John Doerr. In a December 8 speech at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., President Barack Obama called on Congress to consider such a program as part of a plan to accelerate job growth.
Home Star would provide cash incentives for consumers to hire remodelers, production builders, and other construction trades to perform weatherization and energy efficiency retrofits to improve home performance. The Home Performance with Energy Star program would provide a model for efficiency retrofitting standards under Home Star. The Building Performance Institute and other third-party education providers would be called on to implement training programs for home performance contractor and building analyst auditor accreditation and certification.
Home Star would address home efficiency at different levels: a prescriptive track (Silver Star) providing incentives for installations such as insulating, duct and envelope sealing, and lighting replacement; and a performance-based track (Gold Star) establishing incentives to reward actual, third-party-verified energy savings. Incentives would be scaled back and phased out over time as the market develops and stabilizes.
In addition to providing worker training and certification, the program would also establish standards of quality and offer incentives for trades and suppliers to actively sell home performance improvements. Altogether, PERAB maintains Home Star would create new jobs in construction, improve home performance to save consumers money and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and build up the home efficiency retrofit market.
“We feel that there is so much latent capacity [in construction] that can be redeployed quickly,” says Matt Golden, chair of nonprofit home performance industry trade association Efficiency First. “Training already-experienced workers doesn’t take that long.” Golden, who was part of the team that developed the framework of the Home Star proposal, is also the president and founder of home energy remodeling company Recurve in San Francisco.
“This is a huge opportunity,” Golden adds. “In this economy where everyone is struggling, this is a way to take the infrastructure you already have [as a builder]—your employees—and, with a little bit of training, grow your business.” But Golden acknowledges that shifting from a home building model to an efficiency retrofitting model would require builders to reorient their businesses.
