- By Hugh Wolf
- In Uncategorized
Accelerate Economic Growth through Energy Efficiency
Accelerate Economic Growth through Energy Efficiency
The United States needs to accelerate economic growth its been hovering around 1.0% over the past couple quarter and forecasted to even dive deeper as we move into 2017. Both Political parties are under pressure to find solutions to bring growth back up in a meaningful way. Do we eve know how to do it? By looking at the problem from 4000 feet most likely isn’t the best way. Though having your feet on the ground, however, you can see several big opportunities. One way is to reduce energy bills for homes and businesses by making homes and building more efficient. This will in turn require a skilled workforce and creating hundreds of thousands of jobs and others putting money into the economy that otherwise would have been wasted.
Energy Efficiency leads to utility bill savings, getting more and wasting less energy. Reducing bills lead to more comfortable, safe, efficient homes and buildings. This means sealing ducts, eliminating drafts, providing cleaner air ventilation, upgrading insulation, highly efficient HVAC equipment and in many situations replacing windows and adding a properly sized solar system. These renovations typically cost the home owner between $15,000 and $30,000 and the saving could be well over $35,000 not including intrinsic cost like better health do to better air quality, comfort and safety with less maintenance cost do to better performing homes.
Many utilities have tested these measures with varies programs and know they work. The challenge is getting it to scale at a national level and without the motivation and regulatory approval to do so we are losing out on one of our biggest opportunity for growth. These retrofit programs have a very high level of financial incentive that most are not taking advantage of and could be reduced over time diminishing the motivation to create a momentum we need to push growth to an acceptable level of 3-4% over the next 5-10 years. Accelerating this growth by investing is better buildings the worst performing segment of our economy-housing and restore these jobs to pre-recession levels before the housing bubble crash of 2007-08. This initiative could reduce pollution; create healthier homes that reduce time off school and work for children and adults. Working with state agencies to retrain workers to enter the new workforce as home energy performance workers and produce hundreds of thousands of new jobs.
You can join these initiative’s by calling: Eco Kong today at 480-788-7718 and take the first step in making your home or building comfortable, safe and efficient.