Want to make energy efficient renovations? How about your interest in renewable energy? 

Well, here's a new program that is being proposed to help you get some federal money to finance those energy efficient projects.  Property Assessed Clean Energy (PACE) is a new program which is designed to help us finance "energy" saving projects. With PACE not only can you save the earth so to speak, but also save your check book from a quick erosion of your hard-earned money.

PACE allows property owners to pay in increments for their energy efficient investments rather than spending all the money up front. This means that you can begin saving money on energy bills and begin seeing the return before paying for the total cost of implementing an energy savings program.

So how will PACE work?

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Basically as a property owner, if you opt to use PACE, you would agree to an incremental cost to your property taxes for a period of up to 20 years. Property owners do not incur any upfront costs and they benefit from seeing a saving on their energy bill which may exceed the surcharge on their property tax. If a property owner sells the property, this additional cost is transferred to the new property owner.

If homeowners are able to undertake these energy efficiency renovations on a national scale, they could collectively save $21 billion by 2020, as outlined in the OnEarth article mentioned above.  Most residential energy efficiency upgrades can be done in less than a day – and can cut home energy usage by up to 40 percent. Because homes contribute about 20 percent of the country’s climate emissions, these retrofits represent a significant environmental impact in additional to the financial savings homeowners will enjoy.