Home Star RetrofitsHome Star Energy Retrofits and Energy Audits

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.