The city of Houston is offering commercial building owners up to $200,000 in incentives to improve energy efficiency, putting a special emphasis on retrofitting older and smaller buildings. The city will pay to offset 20 percent of the labor and material costs of projects that improve a building’s efficiency by at least 15 percent, said Laura Spanjian, the city’s director of sustainability. Eligible projects could include energy-efficient lighting and windows, insulation and “green roof” technology.

The funds will come from the Energy Efficiency and Conservation Block Grant the city received from the Department of Energy last year as part of the broad federal stimulus package.

To qualify, among other things, you must contract with a Certified Energy Manager (Green Squared has these) to perform an energy audit (Green Squared does these) and make energy utilization recommendations for the office building and the minimum amount of work to qualify for this program is $100,000.

This announcement coincides with the comments that we relayed in August from Spanjian at the Clean Air Through Energy Efficiency Conference held in Austin.

It also jives with what Spanjian said in reference to slowing PACE progress in Texas.

Houston, the “Oil Capital of the World”, has a recently appointed Director of Sustainability, Laura Spanjian, and she told the Texas Tribune that her city was “not going to wait” for the PACE problems to get solved. “We have set aside funds to help commercial property owners with the upfront costs of energy efficiency improvements,” she said in an e-mail. “We’re going to find another model in the short-term while the issues with PACE are being worked out.”

Kudos to Ms. Spanjian on her aggressive approach.