In its continuing effort to promote solar power, The White house has just announced the Clean Energy Savings for All Initiative.
This latest announcement by the Obama Administration follows up numerous previous actions to help ensure that the implementation of solar power across the nation continues its upward trajectory.
The initiative focuses heavily on making access to solar power more available to the average American. A centerpiece of this idea is a goal of providing 1 gigawatt of solar energy to middle and lower income families by 2020. Incredibly, this goal is 10 times the amount that the original figure was. This is yet just another sign that solar’s time is finally here.
Some key items of the initiative are as follows –
- Further Expansion of PACE – PACE (Property-Assessed Clean Energy) is the most prominent government based finance mechanism to help make solar more accessible. Under this new initiative, PACE will be utilized more extensively by Housing and Urban Development, the Department of Veterans Affairs, and the Federal Housing Administration.
- Community Solar Challenge – The Department of Energy’s program to award local teams up to $100,000 to help implement more use of solar power and also help communities reduce their energy use.
- Low Income Housing Energy Assistance Program – promoted by Health and Human Services and the Department of Energy to connect LIHEAP grantees to hundreds of millions of dollars to gain more access to solar.
- Solar Training Network – The Department of Energy is also helping spur the solar revolution by connecting more people to jobs in the solar industry.
- Enabling Local Housing Authorities – Organizations across 36 states, including at least 120 housing authorities, electric co-ops, and power companies are committing more than $287 million for at least 280 megawatts of solar projects focused on enabling more access to low and moderate income communities.
Along with the massive solar expansion already achieved by the private sector, this initiative will help ensure that solar power’s future is bright for many years to come.
As been stated many times before, the underlying force responsible for solar’s growth in both the public and private sector is simply it’s current cost effectiveness. Solar will only grow even more as it becomes even less expensive in the future.
