OREANDA-NEWS. September 17, 2015. To accelerate the nation’s transition to renewable energy and energy efficiency, President Obama announced a robust new set of executive actions and private sector commitments in August at the National Clean Energy Summit.

According to the whitehouse.gov release, the new actions expand opportunities to install energy saving technologies in households today while driving the development of innovative, low-cost clean energy technologies and creating jobs for the future.

Since President Obama took office, the U.S. has rapidly expanded its use of solar technology and empowered more households than ever to track and improve energy use. The U.S. Department of Energy has already put in place appliance efficiency standards that will save American consumers nearly \\$480B on their utility bills through 2030, and the Environmental Protection Agency’s ENERGY STAR Program continues to help save consumers more than \\$34B per year going forward.

The new initiatives will continue to promote the use and development of smart, simple, low-cost technologies to help Americans implement clean energy, reduce energy waste, and lower utility bills. They include:

  • Making \\$1B in additional loan guarantee authority available and announcing new guidelines for distributed energy projects utilizing innovative technology
  • Unlocking residential Property-Assessed Clean Energy (PACE) financing for single-family housing to make is easier for Americans to invest in clean energy technologies
  • Launching a new HUD and DOE program to provide home owners with a simple way to measure and improve the energy efficiency of their homes, by increasing homeowners borrowing power
  • Creating a DOD Privatized Housing Solar Challenge to provide solar power to housing on over 40 military bases across the U.S.
  • Announcing \\$24M for 11 projects in seven states to develop innovative solar technologies that double the amount of energy each solar panel can produce
  • Approving a transmission line that will support bringing online a 485-megawatt photovoltaic facility that will produce enough renewable energy to power more than 145,000 homes
  • Creating an Interagency Task Force to Promote a Clean Energy Future for All Americans; and announcing independent commitments from local governments, utilities, and businesses that are stepping up to drive energy efficiency in more than 300,000 low-income households and investing more than \\$220 million in energy saving activities for veterans and low-income customers to help decrease their energy bills

All of these actions demonstrate the President’s longstanding commitment to create a clean energy economy and build upon his existing energy goals that include:

  • Achieving an economy-wide target to reduce emissions by 26% – 28% below 2005 levels in 2025
  • Increasing the share of renewables – beyond hydropower – in their respective electricity generation mixes to the level of 20% by 2030
  • Installing 300 megawatts of renewable energy across federally subsidized housing by 2020
  • Doubling energy productivity by 2030