Participants on the panel entitled “Accelerating Commercial PACE – How Do We Catalyze the Market?” offered real-world insights into the innovative Property Assessed Clean Energy (PACE) financing mechanism now available through the Florida Green Energy Works program, from the perspective of all the stakeholders in the community who deal with commercial properties. Presenters included a local government that chose to offer the program, a developer and owner of commercial property that has determined to use PACE to finance upgrades to property, a local bank expanding its product line by offering PACE financing to small business customers, and a contractor using PACE to help customers fully pay for the upfront cost of retrofit projects.
Penni Redford, the Sustainability Manager of the City of West Palm Beach, explained that PACE is a powerful part of the City’s toolkit when encouraging private property owners to retrofit their buildings to meet community sustainability goals. According to Ms. Redford, the PACE program allows property owners to overcome the hurdle of large upfront costs for retrofits, and perfectly complements the City’s existing recognition programs such as the U.S. Department of Energy-sponsored Better Buildings Challenge. Read more.