Homeowners looking to improve their home’s eco -rating may be getting a tax break if Obama gets his way. Obama’s newly proposed HOME STAR or “Cash for Caulkers” program would be a federal program, not unlike the Cash for Clunkers program, Cash for Caulkers is a green-minded program meant to help homeowners increase their home’s energy efficiency wit direct incentives. However this program has an additional employment component. According to Efficiency First, the program would help put a quarter of a million skilled but currently unemployed construction workers back to work.
Basically the program would pay homeowners up to half the cost (up to $4,000) to retrofit a house with eco-friendly attributes. HOME STAR has two concurrent tracks: “SILVER STAR, which creates jobs immediately with little additional training, and GOLD STAR, which is a higher quality, performance based system with certification and verification of performance standards. Over time workers – and the industry – would advance from SILVER to GOLD STAR.”
In the SILVER STAR track homeowners qualify for incentives based on a list of eligible eco-friendly measures such as white insulating roofs, wall insulation, air sealing, weatherization, duct sealing, lighting and other energy efficiency “low-hanging fruit.” The GOLD STAR track is a performance-based incentive that rewards actual, audited energy savings – which seems a little hard to track if you ask me, so we’ll see. The program documents note that this would “Start with an energy assessment prior to work that includes energy modeling to predict savings using accredited, specially trained contractors. After the work is complete, it undergoes third party quality assurance audits. Any combination of retrofit measures that results in 20% reduction would be eligible for $3,500 in incentives, with each additional 5% reduction achieving another $1,500 in incentive.”
No matter which track, gold or silver, total Federal incentive cannot exceed 50% of the homeowner’s contribution. It’s estimated that the $23 billion dollar program will retrofit at least 6 million houses and lower the 17% unemployment rate in the construction industry.
See the White House press release and the Home Retrofits for American Jobs, Efficiency and Economic Growth HOMESTAR, aka “Cash for Caulkers” (pdf) memo.
[image via stock.xchng]
Post from: Blisstree