By Jan Ellen Spiegel Monday, January 6, 2014
The program called C-PACE also arrived in 2013 from legislation passed in 2012. It stands for Commercial Property Assessed Clean Energy. Run through CEFIA, it allows commercial properties to borrow money to finance clean energy and/or efficiency projects and then pay it back through an assessment on their property tax bills.
Part of the requirement is that the project has to save more money than the cost of installing and financing it. That’s the easy part. The hard part -– or at least what everyone figured would be the hard part -– was getting communities to pass legislation to allow their property tax bills to be used for it.
The result was a stunner. Some 70 municipalities, not generally known for warp-speed action, have passed the needed resolutions. They represent about 80 percent of the state’s commercial building stock. Already there are 16 closed projects worth a little over $12 million. Five more worth about $3 million have been approved, and there are more than 100 projects worth in excess of $50 million in the pipeline. Read more.