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 [...]
As we mentioned in an April blog post here, VP Biden is a big believer in retrofits. On Tuesday, Biden and HUD announced a new pilot program that will offer credit-worthy borrowers low-cost loans to make energy-saving improvements to their homes. Backed by the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), these new FHA PowerSaver loans will offer [...]
We spend a lot of time on this blog talking about energy efficiency (typically electricity or natural gas), but water conservation is a focus of Green Squared. In fact, we work with apartments and hotels to save money through water saving devices like aerators, shower heads, and toilet tank kits. Houston is #2 on the [...]
A recent DOE technical release by the NREL and the DOE shows that 50% net site energy savings can be achieved in both low-rise and high-rise large office buildings in a range of climates representative of the spectrum of U.S. weather conditions. (They modeled in various parts of the country.) Per the report, the following [...]
According to Chris Pyke, the USGBC’s VP of Research, the LEED market has moved towards existing buildings. USGBC’s certifications for LEED for Existing Buildings (LEED-EB) jumped sharply from less than 15% of all certifications in early 2008 to more than 35% in second-quarter 2010. At the same time, the proportion of LEED for New Construction [...]
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