It's shortly after 11 p.m. EST on November 4, 2008, and Barack Obama has just been declared president-elect of the United States. It is a fitting time to launch this blog, dedicated to the business of green real estate.
Whomever you supported for president, this much is clear: The Obama win is a clear victory for green buildings.
You can read the Obama/Biden energy plan here. The plan calls for:
- * Creating 5 milllion new jobs by strategically investing $150 billion in green technologies over the next 10 years.
- * Ensuring that 10 percent of U.S. electricity comes from renewable sources by 2012, and 25 percent by 2025, by establishing federal requirements that utilities purchase power from renewable sources such as solar, geothermal, wind and hydropower. Green buildings capable of selling sustainable power back to the grid would benefit from such a national requirement by supplying excess power to utilities.
- * Implementing an economywide cap-and-trade program to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent by 2050.
Buildings are a key component of the Obama energy plan. The plan calls for:
- * Building More Livable and Sustainable Communities - The Obama plan endorses additional investment in livable and walkable communities, and in reforming federal transportation funding to level incentives for driving and public transit.
- * Setting National Building Efficiency Goals - The Obama energy plan would implement the 2030 challenge of the American Institute of Architects to make all new buildings carbon neutral with zero net emissions by 2030. Additional national targets would include improving new building efficiency by 50 percent and existing building efficiency by 25 percent over the next decade.
- * Accelerating Green Building Leadership by the U.S. Government - The U.S. government is the world's largest single consumer of energy, spending some $14.5 billion on energy in fiscal 2008. The Obama-Biden plan calls for a 40 percent increase in efficiency in all new federal buildings within five years and carbon neutrality for all new federal buildings by 2024. As well, the plan endorses federal investment in retrofits to achieve a 25 percent increase in the energy efficiency of existing federal buildings within five years, and spending necessary to achieve a 15 percent reduction in federal energy consumption by 2015.
- * Weatherization of Low Income Homes - The Obama platform calls for a national commitment to weatherize at least one million low income homes each year for the next decade to reduce U.S. energy usage, moderate utility demand and increase housing affordability for less affluent Americans.
Will this ambitious program be enacted into law? Only time will tell. But it is worth noting that the creation of green collar jobs has attracted bipartisan support and that Washington is looking to generate fiscal stimulus quickly. The construction sector has been hard hit by the mortgage crisis, and green building development and retrofits represent an attractive near-term strategy to getting Americans back to work. While the Obama plans for energy efficiency may not make it out of Congress intact, I'm betting that the federal government dedicates additional resources to green buildings in 2009 and over the next few years.
Leanne Tobias heads Malachite LLC, a green real estate advisory firm serving developers, investors, building owners and lenders.
