Home Star RetrofitsHome Star Energy Retrofits and Energy Audits

Are you on the Home Star bus or are you off the bus?

Looks like the Home Star Retrofit bill has a vehicle. A ‘Vehicle’ in ‘DC Speak’ is a bigger bill of which Home Star can be a part for passage.

For those of us that want to see real progress on clean energy in this country today, this is our bus. So get on it.

According to the New York Times, the Senate has called off a push for a broad Climate Bill and is instead focused on a more limited bill focusing on Oil Spill issues and will also include Home Star. Hopefully this will couple Home Star together with other sensible legislation that we the people can push our elected officials hard enough on in order to pass.

So ask yourself. Are you on the bus? If so, this means you are making repeated Senate phone calls, talking with friends, blogging, tweeting, whatever you can do  to bring the love and support.  If you aren’t doing that, you’re off the bus.

A few specific actions:

• Call your senator – it takes only 60 seconds, really! They have awesome call centers with courteous, responsive representatives.
• Make sure your company and those that you admire are part of the Home Star Coalition – http://www.homestarcoalition.org/
• Follow the blogs that write about Home Star such as the industry leading blog http://www.efficiencyfirst.org/blog/ – then tweet, blog, facebook like crazy

OK, gang – now’s the time to take action.

What You Need to Do (Today)

Take 60 seconds to call your Senator and ask them to include Home Star in the Small Business Jobs Bill – Just go here to do it now.

Efficiency First has made this really easy for you and it really only takes 60 seconds – a nice customer service rep will answer the phone.

What’s At Stake

The Home Star Retrofit bill needs a vehicle and hopefully the Small Jobs Bill under consideration can be just that.

Home Star is a massive opportunity to simultaneously:

1. Spur job growth in one of the hardest hit industries – residential construction/remodel
2. Help homeowners improve their homes in terms of value, comfort, health and money savings
3. Make a considerable stride to a more energy efficient country.  This means one more step towards less need for offshore drilling, foreign oil, turning mountains into coal and burning them, etc, etc…

The Momentum is Growing!

The Home Star Coalition is now 2,000 strong! Check out some great quotes from industry leaders on Efficiency First’s site (btw, if you haven’t joined Efficiency First, what is stopping you?).

AND. There’s now 25 Senate co-sponsors on the bill – including 3 republicans. Very exciting.

Remember to call your senator – it takes just 60 seconds.

It’s been weeks since I last posted. Please forgive me. My actual job has been taking up all my time :)

There’s a whole bunch of news since the last post.  Here’s a quick roundup.

Progress in the Senate for Home Star

Word is, there will be a Senate hearing on HomeStar on Tuesday 6/22 (Tomorrow!) with extensive outreach throughout the week. This is crunch time.

Plus… 3 republican co-sponsors!!!! Brown, Snowe and Graham! This brings us to 19 or more co-sponsors. The word is the Senate is just working out the budget details but it appears support is most certainly there. Recently the National Association of Manufacturers has also signed on which helps.

Bill Changes

The HomeStar bill has been re-introduced in  the Senate now as S.3434. This new version has a new performance based tax credit based on  the HERS standard. You can find a summary and full text here.

I personally find the new portion based on HERS to be confusing and I unfortunately have not researched the origins of that piece. It is somewhat duplicative of the HomeStar Gold component as outlined here. The HomeStar Gold portion is already performance based and is very simple – make your home 20% more energy efficient and you get a $3,000 rebate.  Adding a tax credit, while potentially good for homeowner pocketbooks seems to just confuse things a bit more and unnecessarily ties the program to a particular rating system. There’s a whole DOE project to examine rating systems and the industry is far from unified around any one standard. So why legislate this in? Probably someone much more knowledgeable pushed for this for a very good reason. Alas, I digress…

Retrofit, Baby Retrofit

A popular blog post by EnergySavvy, which has energy retrofit resources, has been flying around the web this past week. The post compares the energy lost in the Gulf Oil spill to energy retrofits. Basically it would take about 1/40th the cost of oil cleanup to retrofit enough houses to save an equivalent amount of energy. Granted, this is sort of apples to oranges when you consider the loss of life and environmental damage… but the point is clear. Click the image to get to the post.

OK, we’re getting closer…

Here’s what you need to do to support Home Star.  We need everyone to write a note to your Senator. It should take about 5 minutes. Here’s the directions. Just a little further and we can make the Home Star Rebate program real.

And, there’s a rumor of some big announcements in a few days.  Hang on to your seats! Senate action soon.

Rumor has it we may have a Senate vote next week.  Highly unclear at this point.  But coming soon.

Also, at some point I need to get up some analysis of the new John Kerry bill, American Power Act, with respect to the HomeStar rebate program.

For now though, a great weekend to everyone and hopefully we’ll have a vote in the Senate soon!

HOME STAR IS A GO!

We did it!  At least this big huge step.  Big shout out to everyone who walked the halls of congress, sat in the meetings, made the phone calls. You know who you are! The vote was 246 to 161 – huge support.

I’m still getting my head around the amendments and details – but for now let’s enjoy the moment.  But just for a moment…

What’s next!?!

Authorization needs to pass in the Senate and the best guess is for a vote in early June.  Then the budget needs to be appropriated to make it law.  So we’re almost there.  But, it’s still very important to work the grassroots action here.

We’re about 24 hours away from the House Vote on the HomeStar Retrofit Program – H.R. 5019.

Now is our time. Pick up the phone, call your rep. It really only takes 3 min. Trust me, they all have phone centers with helpful easy to work with people. DO IT NOW!!!

To find contact information for your Congressional Representative, go to www.house.gov. Enter your zip code in the “Find Your Representative” search form at the upper left corner of the page (it’s OK to ignore the “+4″ field) and click “Go.”

If you haven’t heard already – the HomeStar bill will get a full House vote THIS Thursday May 6th.

Now is the time we need action. Here’s some handy instruction’s from the Efficiency First mailing list:

Please pick up the phone immediately and call and urge your representative to vote for the Home Star bill, H.R. 5019.

To find contact information for your Congressional Representative, go to www.house.gov. Enter your zip code in the “Find Your Representative” search form at the upper left corner of the page (it’s OK to ignore the “+4″ field) and click “Go.”

Strongbad sayz… ‘Get out the vote!!!’

(image by http://www.dragoart.com)

Want less of this?

Then support this:

Seriously, the BP oil rig explosion has 11 people missing, 42,000 gallons a day spilling out across 1,800 miles and now the US military has stepped in to help. So this is a human life issue, an environmental issue and a national security issue. If you don’t care about that, please just stop reading this blog now.

We all feel deeply for the families impacted here. Nothing can undo the tragedy that has taken place. But there are answers to help prevent this in the future and it begins with energy efficiency.

Today’s ACI Retrofit Summit event was terrific. Far too much to capture here unfortunately.

Congressman Welch spoke in support of HomeStar. Here’s a quick iphone photo: