By Jody Clark
From the October 2013 issue of Today’s Facility Manager
Every year, American building owners lose billions of dollars as they overpay for energy to power their lighting, heating, and cooling systems, as energy is wasted in obsolete equipment or leaks out of a porous building envelope. The right energy efficiency measures can reduce costs by 20% to 40%, but they can also require substantial upfront sums. Additionally, distributed generation solutions such as solar or cogeneration can be combined with efficiency upgrades to provide an even more complete energy solution.
PACE Financing: Points To Consider
By Kristina Klimovich
Property Assessed Clean Energy (PACE) helps achieve one of the primary goals of facility managers (fms)—to improve building performance. PACE is a financing mechanism that can be used to implement renewable energy, energy efficiency, and water conservation upgrades to buildings. The mechanism can fund a full-scale retrofit or a simple lighting replacement.
PACE funds 100% of an improvement project, therefore obviating the need to use internal budget resources. Financing is provided or arranged by a local government and is repaid with an assessment over a term of up to 20 years. The assessment mechanism has been used nationwide for decades to access low-cost capital to finance improvements to private property that meet a public purpose. Usually, a PACE assessment is added to the annual property tax bill and is collected along with other assessments. This repayment mechanism may vary slightly depending on a state’s or municipality’s existing property tax collection procedures. Read more.