Tag Archives: energy efficiency

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McDonnell administration set to fail Virginians on building codes

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Everyone agrees that cutting energy waste is the most cost-effective way to meet our energy needs while reducing reliance on fossil fuels. And making new buildings efficient from the start is the surest way to achieve energy savings. Energy efficiency is the Mom-and-apple-pie part of our energy policy. Who could oppose it?

The Home Builders Association of Virginia, for one. They would rather build cheap housing than efficient housing, even when high utility bills turn cheap housing into expensive housing.

Bowing to aggressive lobbying from the home builders, the Board of Housing and Community Development (BHCD) has backed away from the national model building code provisions that would have improved the efficiency of Virginia residences by as much as 27.4%, according to a U.S. Department of Energy analysis. And, the McDonnell administration has signed off on the weak regulations. Virginia’s Department of Housing and Community Development has proposed a watered-down code that is currently open to public comment until September 29.

The McDonnell administration prides itself on fiscal prudence and its love for the business community. Here is a case where fiscal prudence demands tough love. A watered-down code means money wasted.

The model code provisions would have required higher “R” values in ceiling and wall insulation, resulting in homes that cost less to heat and cool. It would also have required builders to check for leaks mechanically, rather than just eyeballing it, to catch air leaks while they can still be fixed. The code that Virginia is set to pass jettisons these improvements, and others.

It’s cheaper for builders to skimp on insulation and not worry about air leakage, but the result is a home of lower quality and value. Owners and tenants end up having to pay more to keep warm in winter, and cool in the summer. These higher utility costs paid by occupants quickly eclipse the savings to builders.

What’s more, the cost of fixing defects later is much greater than building the house right to start with. Drafty houses are a classic example of the need for strong building codes, because sealing and insulation aren’t visible to buyers, and trying to add them later is difficult and expensive.

Customers who are buying brand-new homes have the right to expect a quality product. Virginians should tell the Department not to waste this opportunity to improve our housing stock for years to come.

A strong building code will also reduce Virginia’s reliance on fossil fuels and help low and moderate-income residents in one of the most cost-effective ways possible. Housing built for the low-end market is particularly vulnerable to poor construction. Buyers usually don’t know where corners have been cut, or don’t care because they plan to rent out the buildings and won’t themselves shoulder the high utility bills.

Some builders do cater to sophisticated buyers with homes that meet higher standards, but the vast majority stick only to what the code requires. Utility bills consume a disproportionate share of the income of residents with low and moderate incomes, and can also be a particular burden for seniors and others on fixed incomes. The failure to keep pace with the national model code means a missed opportunity to help homeowners across the state, as well as future owners and tenants.

The more rigorous model code standards would result in some additional upfront cost to buyers, but the Department of Energy calculates that savings on utility bills would more than cover the additional payment on a mortgage. Over 30 years, the average consumer would see more than $5,000 in savings.

Unfortunately, the pressure from the home builder lobby has resulted in a proposal with greatly weakened provisions that mean most new homes will remain unnecessarily expensive to heat and cool.

Virginians should not have to live with leaky, inefficient homes. The Department of Housing and Community Development should restore and adopt the full 2012 model building code standards, to improve our housing stock now and for the future.

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On-bill loans for energy upgrades: win-win

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This guest column by Seth Heald originally appeared in the Rappahannock News on July 18, 2013. 

A little-noticed announcement earlier this month about an energy-efficiency pilot project in South Carolina could mean good news for the hundreds of thousands of Virginians who get their power from electric cooperatives.

Both South Carolina and Virginia have numerous electric cooperatives that provide power to customers in rural areas (and these days some no-longer-rural areas). These co-ops date to the 1930s, when Congress passed the Rural Electrification Act to provide loans and establish co-ops to help bring electricity for the first time to people in areas where investor-owned utilities were unwilling to go.

South Carolina’s “Help My House!” program showed that a creative financing measure called on-bill financing can help co-op members pay for efficiency upgrades to their homes that reduce their electricity consumption by more than a third on average.  The program paid for contractors to upgrade heat pumps, add insulation, seal ducts, and take other common-sense measures to make customers’ homes more comfortable and energy-efficient.

With on-bill financing the South Carolina co-op members didn’t have to pay upfront for their home improvements. Instead they pay over time on their electric bills. And because electricity consumption was significantly down, customers’ total electric bills generally went down even with the loan-repayment charges tacked on.  Efficiency contractors benefited too, which can create good local jobs.

That’s about as win-win as you can get—home improvements and lower electric bills, and more jobs, with no sacrifice of convenience or comfort. And once the loans are paid off, electric bills go down even more. The co-ops win too, because reducing customers’ electricity consumption on a broad scale can postpone or eliminate the need to build expensive new generation plants.

Electric co-ops are owned by their customers, so the South Carolina co-op boards and managers deserve great credit for undertaking this new program, which promises so many benefits to their member-owners.

So why can’t we do this here in Virginia? The short answer is we can. And we should. Soon.

But some Virginia co-op managers and board members have been reluctant to move forward aggressively on efficiency programs, preferring the old-fashioned method of building more generation capacity rather than helping members make efficiency upgrades. And some Virginia co-op managers and boards seem to worry more about their total revenues than about helping their customers lower their bills. Some co-op boards apparently are unconvinced that efficiency measures on a broad scale can benefit not only customers but the co-ops themselves.

That’s begun to change in Virginia. My co-op has launched an efficiency pilot program. But Virginia still has a lot of catching up to do to achieve the remarkable results that South Carolina co-ops have now shown are possible.

One thing essential to South Carolina’s success was 2010 state legislation that allowed on-bill financing, including having the loan obligation “stay with the meter” if a customer sells his home before paying off the loan.  The South Carolina co-ops pushed for that change and got it.

Virginia co-op members, and more importantly their influential managers and boards, should press our state legislators and regulators to make the changes needed to allow on-bill financing here. If anything can win bipartisan support in Virginia, it ought to be a simple measure that can help hundreds of thousands of hard-working electricity consumers improve their homes with no upfront costs while also reducing their power bills.

Seth Heald, of Rixeyville, is a lawyer and a member of Rappahannock Electric Cooperative, which is one of the Virginia co-ops that co-own Old Dominion Electric Cooperative.