by aleida, on April 28th, 2010
Image courtesy of BrightTALK webinar
BrightTALK’s Green Building Summit continued on April 22, 2010 with What’s Good and What’s Next: The Future of Sustainable Materials, a panel discussion moderated by our very own Kevin O’Donnell. I won’t write more about the session here as Kevin will post on it later this week. Instead, I’ll skip right to the day’s final session, titled Solving the Cost Hurdle for Green Retrofits: GreenFinanceSF. It was presented by Rich Chien with the San Francisco Department of the Environment.
The city of San Francisco not only promotes but actually mandates high-performance buildings. LEED Silver is the standard for new construction of all municipal, and most commercial and residential buildings. But, to date, there haven’t been many city programs aimed specifically at the residential sector. Enter GreenFinanceSF, the city’s newest PACE (Property Assessed Clean Energy) program. It promotes low cost – high savings residential building improvements.
In essence, the program lends people money so that they can immediately make money-saving “green” improvements to their properties. On a shamelessly skeletal level, here’s how it works:
- All retrofit projects must be related to energy efficiency (insulation, water heating, window replacement, etc.), renewable energy (solar panels), water (efficient fixtures), or “other” (greywater irrigation systems, rainwater harvesting, living roofs).
- The property must be within the City and County of San Francisco.
- The property must be current on all property tax and mortgage payments.
- The property owner voluntarily applies for financing, listing all planned retrofits and committing to performing them.
- The applicant must be listed as an owner on the property’s title.
- Applicant must agree to get energy audits or Water-Wise evaluations as outlined by the program.
- Applicant must participate in any applicable state and city rebate and incentive programs.
- If approved, the program will provide financing to the property owner to pay for the retrofits. Financing cannot exceed 10% of the property’s assessed value.
- The minimum financing per property is $5,000, and the maximum is $50,000.
- Once financing has been provided, the program places a lien on the property, and the owner begins to repay that financing, with a repayment period of up to 20 years.
As of right now, GreenFinanceSF, which was launched just this month on April 12, applies only to residential properties. In mid-May, the program will begin supporting higher incentives for Economically-Disadvantaged Populations (EDP), and in late May it will accept applications from commercial properties.
During the webinar, Chien provided a considerably more in-depth review of GreenFinanceSF, and he also quickly mentioned some other local programs and policies applicable to existing residential and commercial buildings. It is definitely worth hearing. Click here for the show.
Thanks for reading!
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