Energy: Retrofitting Older Buildings

With rising energy costs and oil at + $107 per barrel, the focus is on savings.

Since most of the Cambridge housing stock and municipal buildings are more than 50 years old, the solutions are innovative. Take a look at what they did with the City Hall Annex. Maybe we could employ some of their ideas with Middleboro's buildings. What could we save?

PBS offered the following NOW program with video on its site:

Save Energy, Save Money, Save the Planet

Could a new effort to fight global warming save money and create jobs at the same time? NOW looks at a city-wide plan in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to make all its buildings more energy efficient. Up to 80 percent of emissions in many urban cities comes from buildings. Cambridge hopes that this unprecedented effort to green its buildings will reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 10 percent in just five years, the equivalent of taking 33,000 cars off the road. If every major city in America took the same approach, it would have a significant impact on the carbon footprint of the United States —and it would generate tens of millions of new "green" jobs.

The Cambridge Energy Alliance, a nonprofit group, will help clients cut their energy use 15-30 percent, which translates into a lower utility bill. The Alliance will then help clients secure loans to pay for the building retrofits, loans designed to pay themselves off by the savings on those utility bills. Retrofitting thousands of buildings could also create a new green job market in Cambridge. It's a bold new experiment, but the Alliance hopes to become a national model that puts green thinking on display, as well as more green in people's pockets. Will this entrepreneurial effort bring new converts to the environmental movement? NOW on PBS