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Selected tag(s): PACE

PACE Financing for California’s Clean Energy Future, Part 1: Expanding the Residential Market

By Scott Hofmeister / Published: March 19, 2014

When it comes to protecting the environment and fighting climate change, California has always been a first mover.

Now the state is boldly acting to unleash a new market that saves energy, cuts pollution, and drastically increases clean energy investment for California’s residents.

Last week, California approved a $10 million reserve that will revive the Property Assessed Clean Energy (PACE) program for residential customers.

PACE allows customers to take advantage of energy saving upgrades to their home with no money down. Customers simply use a portion of their savings to pay off the investment over time through their property tax bill. Financing can be entirely provided by private lenders at no cost to taxpayers. Read More »

Posted in California, Clean Energy, Energy Efficiency, Energy Financing, On-bill repayment, Renewable Energy / Tagged PACE | Read 2 Responses

Record-Setting ‘PACE’ for Commercial Buildings in California

By EDF Blogs / Published: February 6, 2014

Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti and Hilton Hotel executives were all smiles last week, and for good reason: they had just cut the ribbon on the completion of a $7 million energy efficiency upgrade to the Universal City Hilton – the largest project of its kind in the U.S.

LA’s record-setting project is the third in a string of major commercial building retrofits in California in just the past two years, all thanks to Property Assessed Clean Energy (PACE), a program that allows customers to finance clean energy upgrades and pay them back, over time, on their property tax bills.

What’s made PACE so successful is that it allows customers to avoid the sizeable up-front costs of major building upgrades, while saving energy and money. Read More »

Posted in California, Clean Energy, Energy Efficiency, Energy Financing, State / Also tagged PACE 2.0 | Comments are closed

PACE 2.0: California Leading the Next Evolution in Clean Energy Finance

By EDF Blogs / Published: January 23, 2014

Property Assessed Clean Energy (PACE) is an innovative financing technique for clean energy retrofits that was first developed in Berkeley in 2008, giving energy efficiency projects a huge boost throughout the U.S.

Here’s how it works: Property owners agree to a long-term tax assessment on their home or building in exchange for the upfront funding to pay for a retrofit. What’s great about the program is its ability to essentially eliminate one of the biggest barriers to energy efficiency retrofits: up-front costs.

And, just as with any other property tax assessment, the obligation transfers to the new owner upon a sale of the property. This transferability allows property owners to consider projects with longer payback periods as the obligation does not become immediately due upon sale. Read More »

Posted in California, Clean Energy, Energy Financing, State / Also tagged PACE 2.0 | Comments are closed

Upcoming Webinar: How Commercial PACE and ICP are Raising Investor Confidence in Energy Efficiency

By EDF Blogs / Published: January 16, 2014

By: Matt Golden, Senior Energy Finance Consultant

The Investor Confidence Project (ICP) and Commercial Property Assessed Clean Energy (PACE) programs offer many opportunities for collaboration in the buildings and energy efficiency sector. We will be exploring this potential for partnership in the upcoming webinar, Commercial PACE: Raising Confidence in Energy Savings to Ramp-Up Investment and Demand, held on January, 30^th 2014, at 2pm ET/ 11am PT.

This one-hour, Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) / PACEnow webinar is designed to help Commercial PACE administrators, investors, project developers and building owners understand how standardization can facilitate multiple stakeholder alignment, ensure underwriting needs are met and enable energy efficiency investment while lowering transaction costs. It will include a brief presentation on EDF’s Investor Confidence Project, followed by panel discussion focusing on how Commercial PACE programs are using ICP to address the owner and investor projected savings-confidence challenge, which has been an impediment to energy retrofit financing nationwide. Moreover, the panel will share how ICP is enabling energy efficiency financing to become a mainstream financial asset class with the high degree of standardization, predictability and scale that investors demand. Read More »

Posted in Energy Efficiency, Investor Confidence Project / Tagged PACE | Comments are closed

Don’t Miss Three Important, Upcoming Webinars from EDF’s Investor Confidence Project

By EDF Blogs / Published: November 6, 2013

By: Matt Golden, Senior Energy Finance Consultant, Environmental Defense Fund

Nearly 40% of U.S. energy is consumed by both residential and commercial buildings, which emit more than a third of our country’s greenhouse gases. Realizing all of the available cost-effective energy efficiency savings would require roughly $279 billion of investment, resulting in more than $1 trillion in energy savings over ten years.

Environmental Defense Fund’s Investor Confidence Project (ICP) opens up energy efficiency to investment markets by laying the foundation necessary to enable organizations to tap into this vast potential. This means turning energy efficiency upgrades in the commercial building sector into an asset that can be bought and traded, much like stocks and bonds. By developing a straightforward set of protocols that define a clear road-map for upgrades, ICP creates an investment-quality asset class whose risks and returns are transparent. Ultimately, large-scale adoption of the ICP framework will reduce transaction costs and engineering overhead, while increasing the reliability and consistency of savings.

ICP will be hosting a series of webinars targeted at specific stakeholders in the energy efficiency sector, and strongly encourage individuals and organizations interested in the future of the energy efficiency industry to attend. With the assistance and feedback of industry leaders, investors and programs, ICP has developed a range of Energy Performance Protocols tailored to market needs and project types that will reduce transaction costs, manage performance risk and increase deal flow. Our webinar schedule this fall will focus on how these protocols can create value for individual projects, organizations and the energy efficiency industry as a whole.

Posted in Energy Efficiency, Investor Confidence Project / Also tagged Energy Efficiency, ICP | Comments are closed

Setting the PACE on Clean Energy Finance

By Brad Copithorne / Published: September 26, 2013

This commentary originally appeared on EDF’s California Dream 2.0 blog.

I spend most of my time working to establish On-Bill Repayment programs that allow property owners to use their utility bill to repay loans for cost-saving energy efficiency or renewable energy upgrades. Many of my colleagues work on a similar program known as Property Assessed Clean Energy (“PACE”), which uses the property tax bill for repayment. Since both utility and property tax bills are usually paid, both PACE and OBR are expected to lower the cost and increase the availability of financing for clean energy projects.

Last week, I was invited to attend a meeting of the leading PACE program administrators, property owners and other market participants in the country — and was pleasantly surprised to learn how much progress is being made.

Connecticut launched their program in January and is expected to close $20 million of PACE transactions for commercial properties by year end. The Toledo, Ohio area expects to have executed $18 million of commercial transactions by the end of 2013. Sonoma County, with a population of less than 500,000, has already completed $64 million of financings for residential and commercial properties. In late 2012, CaliforniaFIRST launched a PACE program for commercial properties that has already received 130 applications.

Posted in California, Energy Efficiency, On-bill repayment / Also tagged Energy Efficiency, OBR | Read 2 Responses