Efficiency First

The United States District Court for the Northern District of California has taken up lawsuits filed by the State of California, Sonoma and Placer Counties, the Sierra Club, and the City of Palm Desert that seek to overturn the Federal Housing Finance Agency’s July 6, 2010 directives that were designed to stop PACE residential programs nationwide.

I’m predicting that 2011 is going to be the year green becomes hot. And, I’m talking green as in value, not building materials.

As I wrote last week, we’ve been anticipating market value for energy efficiency for some time. Today we have obstacles in the way of this value. GreenMLS 2.0 could make deep progress to clear those obstacles.

What is GreenMLS 2.0?

The ACI (Affordable Comfort, Inc.) National Conference is the largest annual gathering of Home Performance professionals in the country. This year’s conference is in San Francisco — will you be there? Use your EF member discount to save money when you register. Click here to log in and view the discount code. Efficiency First has [...]

In a recent post on Switchboard, staff blog of the Natural Resources Defense Council, the NRDC’s Dr. David Goldstein delivers a realistic assessment of how government policies can fail to promote innovation and job creation in the green technology sector. “Research alone isn’t enough in the real world,” Goldstein writes. “We have plenty of job-creating new [...]

Efficiency First members in Florida joined a conference call on Thursday, January 20 to launch the Florida Efficiency First chapter. The chapter will focus on issues that will build the Home Performance industry across the state and help local companies succeed. The group made plans to meet in person while at the RESNET conference in [...]

Did you know you could be saving money on payroll processing fees, office supplies like paper & ink cartridges, conference registration fees and Energy Auditing Software? Efficiency First has partnered with some really cool companies that offer generous discounts exclusively to member companies on business insurance, industry tools, training courses, marketing services and much much [...]

New figures released today by the U.S. Commerce Department reflect persistent sluggishness in the residential construction sector, with housing starts showing only a slight gain over the historic lows logged 2009. The report underlines the continued need to stimulate new job creation for American construction workers who have been sidelined by the recession. According to [...]

We hope you can join us at the ACI Northwest Conference, going on next month! It will be taking place on February 1-2 in Portland, Oregon.

The Building Performance Institute (BPI) released figures this week showing a significant surge in professional Home Performance credentialing and training activities last year. According to the report, BPI-certified professionals are now located in all 50 states and five other nations, with the Western region seeing the most aggressive growth of over 400 percent in 2010 [...]

The National Home Performance Council has published a new report profiling the current state of whole-house energy retrofit programs in the United States. The study, which is based on a review of 126 programs nationwide, provides a broad snapshot of how government policies have impacted state- and utility-based energy efficiency retrofit programs in recent years. [...]