HUD Sets Ambitious Goal on Renewable Energy

Over the summer, President Obama set out a landmark Climate Action Plan for the Federal government. This was based on the premise that, not only do we have a moral obligation to slow the effects of climate change and mitigate pollution, but that the strength of our economy depends on our ability to build resilient communities.

The US Department of Housing and Urban Development will play an important role in meeting the President’s goals in several ways, including through an ambitious new goal to reach 100 megawatts of installed renewable capacity on federally assisted housing by 2020.

Green building developers have been leading the way toward this goal by demonstrating that on-site renewables are a practical, effective strategy for multi-family residential projects. This is a sub-set of thousands of projects successfully generating on-site renewable energy, as well as those purchasing off-site green energy.

We can find highlights of their work on GBIG.org, including:

We recently added a brand new set of six HUD case studies for on-site renewables on federally assisted standards. Learn more: http://www.gbig.org/collections/14046.
We also created new collections including examples of multi-family buildings with on-site renewables. Each of these projects combines energy efficiency strategies and on-site renewables to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, manage load growth, and limit peak demand. Learn more: http://www.gbig.org/collections/14045

Moving forward, we are looking forward to the opportunity help multi-family projects contribute to HUD’s ambitious goal by utilizing the GBIG.org platform. We anticipate that this will involve sharing information with new partners with the common goal of promoting more efficient and effective markets, such as the National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s Open PV Project.

GBIG.org will provide mechanisms to link currently disparate data to make it easier for project developers, renewable energy installers, and financing entities to discover and use information about PV technology, generation capacity, project financing, and establish relationships to other green building goals, such as energy efficiency.

This work will help provide more information about individual projects, understand dynamic markets, and recognize leadership.