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Energy Programs: What’s Next? What’s Best? What Would You Recommend?

October 10th, 2009 categories: Financing, Green Renovation, Investors, Politics and Programs

As you know, the methods used here at GreenEarthEquities, require no government funding, stimulus or otherwise,  no utility programs, and no tax breaks to operate profitably.

So I haven’t paid much attention to those programs as they have been developing.   But last week I heard two comments that caught my attention:

One came from a program manager who said, “You’ve heard of money with strings attached?  This money doesn’t have strings, It has iron re-bar and concrete controls attached….”  Wow! What can you say about that?   Probably the result of consultancy and bureaucracy gone wild?   Definitely didn’t make me want to participate.

Then, one of the participants on last week’s round table call had been to an investor’s meeting and met an accomplished “house flipper”  (not Energy-Wise, just a good businessperson) who had participated in one of the foreclosure programs in a large Northern California City who reported, “Our average renovation costs $25,000 but when we participate in the program the cost goes up to $70,000.   Double Wow!   It may not have been so bad, but the program in question doesn’t even deliver respectable energy savings for the bloated price tag.

These two comments in the same week, caused me to put on my Taxpayer’s Hat and say, “There’s got to be a better way!”    It seems clear, Bureaucracy, if left to it’s own devices, will run amuck.  So if there’s a better way to spend all this stimulus money, what is it?    What would you recommend?

I’ve decided to collect and publish “best practices” about the various programs that I become aware of around the State and Nation.   I will be looking for  the following as I rate the various programs:

1.  How well does the program deliver measurable energy savings?

2.  How well does the program create new Green Jobs?

3. What percentage of the funds go to overhead as opposed to really saving energy?

4.  How “User Friendly” is the program?  To Consumers, and Contractors?

Please weigh in.   Do you have a favorite program that should be emulated and promoted?  Maybe an un-favorite program that should be exposed as a bloated paperwork nightmare that doesn’t spend your tax dollars to meet these objectives…

None of us are as smart as all of us.   And I have purposely stayed out of the loop, being happy enough to avoid the bureaucracy of the programs.   But I can see that I can no longer stay in my happy place.    I must speak up.   But I need your input.   Earlier today I taught my “Energy Wise Renovation Of Foreclosed Homes” class at the PG&E Stockton Training Center.   At the end, I put out the same request and I really did hear 2 great brand new (to me) ideas that I will be incorporating into the programs that I will be recommending.

Please add your ideas to the Comment section or email me if you would like to be a guest blogger on this site.

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 10th, 2009 at 12:12 am and is filed under Financing, Green Renovation, Investors, Politics and Programs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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