President Obama’s Better Buildings Initiative
President Obama recently proposed several incentives designed to encourage commercial building owners to increase the energy efficiency of their buildings by 20% over the next decade. The White House stated that the proposal, the Better Building Initiative (BBI), will save business owners $40 billion in energy retrofitting costs, allowing for more hiring, better products and increased shareholder value. The President outlined his plan at a February 3 visit to Pennsylvania State University.
The BBI’s five-point plan includes:
- New tax incentives for building efficiency: The President is urging Congress to change the current tax deduction for commercial building upgrades to a more generous credit. Other possible changes to the current tax deduction include lowering the energy savings threshold for owners of existing buildings and permitting the transfer of the tax benefit to third-party retrofit investors.
- More financing opportunities for commercial retrofits: The initiative seeks to create a Department of Energy pilot program to provide loan guarantees for energy efficiency upgrades in hospitals, schools and other commercial buildings.
- “Race to Green” competitive grant program: The President proposes to offer competitive grants to state and/or local governments designed to encourage upgrades and streamlining of building standards.
- The Better Buildings Challenge: The President is asking CEOs and university presidents to commit to a series of actions to make their facilities more efficient, in turn becoming eligible for public recognition, technical assistance and best-practices sharing through a peer network.
- Training for commercial building technology workers: The initiative also seeks to provide more workforce training in such areas as energy auditing and building operations as well as launch the Building Construction Technology Extension Partnership training program modeled on the successful Manufacturing Extension Partnership, a training program for manufacturing companies.
While the Administration has not estimated how much the BBI will actually cost, it intends to pay for the initiative through higher taxes on oil and gas companies. Further details on the program, including its projected cost appears in the President’s budget proposal released earlier this week.
