I want to share a recently published paper by John Millhone, senior advisor to the FAS Building Technologies Program. John authored a paper for FAS recounting the history of the Weatherization Assistance Program, as well as recommendations for future actions, which can be found here. John is currently a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment [...]
The Weatherization Assistance Program Technical Assistance Center has a great page of information about ramp up capacity and planning for the program to handle the $5 Billion on its way from the stimulus bill. The page contains information about ramp up capacities, workforce scenarios and projected workers needed, and impacts and savings. While there is [...]
On Tuesday, President Obama signed the $787 Billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act into law. The act is estimated to save three and a half million jobs over the next two years. We’ve kept an eye on it through its development, and I want to give an update as to what made it out the [...]
The House and Senate came to an agreement on a final, compromised version of the stimulus package yesterday. As of this afternoon, the final language hasn’t been released yet, so I dont know the specifics as to what made the final cut, and what funding levels will be. Once the language gets released I’ll post [...]
President Obama held his first prime-time press conference yesterday, fielding questions focusing on the current economic crisis and the bailout currently being debated on capitol hill. Responding to a question on finding bipartisan solutions in the bailout, President Obama continued to support the idea of energy-efficient retrofits as a means of job creation and economic [...]
In an interview with CBS’s Katie Couric on Wednesday, President Obama was asked about spending measures in the House version of the stimulus package that have been criticized by Sen. Mitch McConnell and others, including $6.2 Billion for the Weatherization Assistance Program. President Obama makes the case for the weatherization program as a means to [...]
I was directed to this article written by Katie Fehrenbacher in Business Weekly. I think it highlights a lot of the points we’ve been discussing about the Weatherization program in the stimulus, and its certainly worth a read.
Looking at the numbers pulled out from yesterday’s post, there are a few things I want to note. First of all, the amount of money being put into building retrofits is pretty astounding. Just under 35 billion is included in the house stimulus package that is strictly for retrofitting and renovating buildings. This isn’t all [...]
The House of Representatives passed the The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 yesterday, sending the stimulus package to the senate. We’ve taken a look through the bill and have pulled out the sections related to buildings, and more specifically, building retrofits. Overall, we’re pleased to see that so much attention has been paid [...]
FAS has created two energy‐efficiency proposals for a potential economic stimulus package. The first is a straightforward expansion of the DOE Weatherization Assistance Program, which has delivered significant results in carbon reduction and energy efficiency but is starved of resources. The second is a new program of grants for point‐of‐sale home energy retrofits loosely based [...]