Efficiency First

Please check out our upcoming webinar! “Getting to Fair Cost Effectiveness Testing” Thursday, October 27th at 1:00PM EASTERN / 10:00AM PACIFIC FREE for Efficiency First Members: Click here to log-in to your account and register. Non-Member Registration: Non-Efficiency First Members are invited to join this webinar for a $50 fee. Please click here to access non-member registration. [...]

Washington, DC – October 19, 2011 –Efficiency First, a trade association of home performance contractors from across the country, applauds Senators Michael Bennet (D-CO) and Johnny Isakson (R-GA) for their bipartisan bill to encourage investment in home energy efficiency.  Senators Bennet and Isakson will introduce the “Sensible Accounting to Value Energy Act” or “SAVE Act” [...]

Good news out there for green homeowners: there’s now a tool available to help describe the value of energy-saving features in the appraisal of their homes. The nation’s largest professional association of real estate appraisers , the Appraisal Institute, has published an addendum to Fannie Mae’s Form 1004. Form 1004 is the industry’s mostly widely [...]

Green homeowners and the home performance industry have won a small but potentially important victory against the Federal Housing Finance Authority (FHFA).  A U.S. district court judge has ruled against the FHFA regarding the agency’s recent comments on Property Assessed Clean Energy (PACE) financing.  In July 2010, the FHFA released a statement that the PACE [...]

Governor Jerry Brown is asking the California Public Utilities Commission to come up with a way to extend a longstanding electric surcharge used to fund energy efficiency projects.  The public goods charge, set to expire this year, is a 1.5% tax on electricity bills that has been around since 1996.  The average utility customer is [...]

Hang out in energy efficiency circles these days, and you’re bound to hear about “cost-effectiveness.” Cost-effectiveness is a major consideration for public utility commissions to approve utility energy efficiency programs, so using the most appropriate test is critical to growing the residential energy efficiency space. But current cost-effectiveness tests do not always fit today’s home [...]

On September 13, the Kansas Commerce Department returned $1.5 million of an original $22 million in American Recovery and Reinvestmant ACT (AARA) funds taken from Efficiency Kansas in July. The $1.5 million is expected to cover the costs of all pending loan applications in Kansas for home performance improvements to houses and small businesses. While [...]