New Program Rising: Home Star or “Cash for Caulkers”

Silicon Valley investor John Doerr is trying to do for green tech what he did for Internet companies like Google and Amazon. Not only is his firm investing in green technology firms that offer a long-term upside, but, in his capacity as a member of the President’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board (PERAB), Doerr is also promoting a $23 billion program to weatherize thousands of American homes. It is still too early to know if the program will be enacted, but it is currently gaining momentum at the highest levels of government.

Doerr’s program was the centerpiece of a PERAB discussion held with the President on Nov. 2 at the White House. And in subsequent weeks as the outlook for a “jobless recovery” has grown more likely, so too has Doerr’s proposal, with proponents of the idea added to the list every day.

“In the very near term, the way we can generate the most jobs is through home retrofits,” Doerr told the group in a videotaped meeting in the Roosevelt room. “There is about 17 percent unemployment in the construction industry right now and there are about 200,000 home retrofits done each year. But over the next 20 years, we probably ought to be doing 5 million of these retrofits per year, or saving the energy wasted — up to 40 percent — over 100 million existing homes. Were we to develop a program to do that, we could create hundreds of thousands, even 1 million jobs per year in an industry with high-wage jobs and where the savings from the work stays in the pockets of American consumers.”
Officially dubbed “Home Star” (in a nod to the Energy Star program), the program would consist of $18 billion in homeowner incentives, $2 billion for quality assurance audits on energy efficiency projects, and $3 billion in retailer incentives as well as funds to create awareness for the program.

”The way I like to put it is that ‘Cash for Clunkers’ mobilized America’s car dealers to cause change very rapidly,” Doerr told the group. ”The equivalent of that for home retrofits would be ‘Cash for Caulkers.’ What we would do is incentive consumers to work with our out of work trades, remodelers and builders to do this work.” The phrase got a chuckle from the President and other economic recovery board members, which include GE CEO Jeff Immelt, White House chief of staff Rahm Emanual, former Fed chairman Paul Volcker and current chair of the council of economic advisors, Lawrence Summers, among others.

Building Performance Institute Backs It

Among the clear winners if Home Star moves forward are agencies that provide credentials for performing energy audits, namely Malta, N.Y. based Building Performance Institute. Not surprisingly, the organization offered its official backing to the program.

“The nationwide unemployment rate is at 10 percent, but the construction industry is one of the hardest hit at 17 percent. The need to install energy efficiency improvement tactics on 5.9 million homes will bring people back to work,” says David Hepinstall, BPI’s Chairman of the Board. “Struggling contracting companies can transition their business model or a portion of their business completely into weatherization services, including whole-home energy audits and the development of work scopes for energy retrofit improvements, or with appropriate training and certification, begin to incorporate some weatherization improvement measures into their existing areas of expertise.”

Courtesy: http://www.qualifiedremodeler.com/interactive/2009/11/

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