These Recovery Act funds will help create new partnerships to deliver energy bill savings to entire neighborhoods and towns. Bringing energy retrofits to whole neighborhoods at a time will simplify the process for homeowners and significantly reduce costs. When applied on a national scale, the program could save billions of dollars annually in utility bills for households and businesses and create thousands of jobs across the country.

“The Retrofit Ramp-Up initiative is designed to slice through the barriers identified in this report – inconvenience, lack of information, and lack of financing – and to make energy efficiency easy and accessible to all,” said Energy Secretary Stephen Chu. “We want to make our communities more energy efficient, block by block, neighborhood by neighborhood — eventually expanding to entire cities and states. We can literally bring energy efficiency to the doorsteps of the American people.”

Separately, the DOE will accept state proposals to use State Energy Grant or Energy Efficiency Conservation Block Grant funds for Property Assessed Clean Energy (PACE) pilots. This is a new model which allows communities to provide financing to homeowners to install renewable energy systems and retrofit buildings that can be paid off over time on their property tax bills. The White House is announcing a “Policy Framework for PACE Financing Programs” developed through an interagency process to ensure that effective homeowner and lender safeguards are included in PACE programs.