Keeping PACE on Energy Efficiency: A Primer on PACE Financing

This article and video are published by the Center for American Progress.

What is PACE financing? How would PACE financing programs create real savings for homeowners?

Ask the Expert: Bracken Hendricks on PACE Financing 

What is PACE financing?

 Property-Assessed Clean Energy is an innovative tool for financing the types of investments we need to make to improve the energy efficiency of our homes and offices today. The market for energy efficiency is broken. When you're investing in a home, it makes more sense to invest in a granite countertop because you know that will affect the price of your home when you sell it. Energy efficiency is more subtle, even though the economic benefits are often much greater. Property-Assessed Clean Energy creates a tool for linking investments in energy efficiency back to the title of the home, so that when you sell your home, the value of those investments conveys to the new homeowner, rather than moving with you, tied to your credit when you move on to a new building. It's a smart fix for a real problem in the current real estate market that can drive substantial new investment into energy efficiency that will create jobs, save energy, and cut pollution today. 

How would PACE financing programs create real savings for homeowners?

 Every month, homeowners across America get an energy bill, and we pay it without thinking about it. But much of the money we spend is on wasted energy that leaks out of our windows or goes into heat off of our appliances that we never use and provides no real value. There's a saying that what we really care about is cold beer and hot showers. We don't care about kilowatts; we don't care about gigatons. the real thing is the services that energy provides. What if every month instead of paying for wasted energy that we don't want, we spent less to get the very same services? We had real savings on our energy bills, and then we used a very mall portion of those savings to pay off a loan. PACE financing and other tools for innovative financing allow real energy cost savings in the future to be used to create job creating investments today that help solve global warming and help put America on a path toward energy independence. It's a critically important tool for building a low-carbon economy; it's an economy that we desperately need all across America; out of work construction workers and manufacturing workers need new tools like PACE financing to put America back to work in the clean energy economy.