The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, passed in February of 2009, provided more than $94 million dollars for home weatherization in the commonwealth. After weatherization the typical home is 30 percent more efficient, leading to greater savings for Virginia families.
How You Can Help
Invest in Energy Efficiency for Our Future
Virginia needs to take action to reduce its energy consumption. With buildings consuming enormous amounts of energy, Virginia needs to adopt the latest international standards on building codes. Send a message to Governor Kaine to make sure he supports more energy efficient buildings. Click here
Brief Summary
Energy efficiency is the cheapest solution for families: It avoids costly new generation, stabilizes electricity bills, maintains the economy, and creates jobs. Energy efficiency is the quickest way to meet Virginia's growing energy demands. Energy efficiency is the cleanest way to provide electricity because it cuts the need to create new polluting power plants.
Homes and businesses account for almost half of our energy use, half of our global warming pollution. We can do better.
From promoting strong local and state building codes to strong federal energy efficiency requirements for natural gas and electric utilities, we are working to rewrite the rules that affect how we build to make all new buildings zero-energy by 2030.
To get to zero, we need to:
- Improve the energy efficiency of our existing buildings by investing in weatherization and retrofits.
- Ramp up building energy codes—the rules that set the minimum for building efficiency.
- Make sure we’re enforcing these codes.
- Improve the energy efficiency of lighting, furnaces, and electronic products; such as televisions and computers.
- Give innovative builders the tools they need to go even further by retrofitting old buildings and developing new ways to save energy.
- Make it easy for everyone to add solar panels and other renewables to their homes and businesses.
- Dramatically increase gas and electric utilities energy efficiency programs by requiring utilities to invest in energy conservation programs.
