The United States Department of Energy awarded the State of Michigan this $30 million grant in June of 2010. How did Michigan get the second highest award in the country? Key stakeholders throughout Michigan banded together to create this amazing program. The city of Detroit, Southeast Michigan suburbs, the city of Grand Rapids, and other communities throughout the state worked with Michigan’s Bureau of Energy Systems and Michigan Saves to build this creative, long term program.
Our objective is to make it easy for homeowners and building owners to implement energy efficiency improvements. We’ll study various community based marketing and outreach mechanisms to determine what interests people, and moves them to act. We’re creating a long term market for energy efficiency, putting people to work, helping Michigan residents and Detroit commercial property owners save money, and making our buildings warm, safe and comfortable.
The residential program consists of 27 neighborhoods which will be chosen throughout the state to participate in a “sweep.” Each sweep will consist of 420 homes. The commercial program includes energy efficiency upgrades for commercial, institutional, and public buildings in the city of Detroit. A variety of incentives, financing options, and marketing and outreach variables will be tested in both the commercial and residential programs.
This exciting program will reach over 11,000 homes throughout the state and 131 commercial, public, and industrial buildings in the city of Detroit. Through these efforts, we expect to create more than 2,000 green jobs and avoid 1.2TBTUs of energy consumption and 19.6 tons of greenhouse gas emissions per year!
BetterBuildings for Michigan was designed to create a catalyst within Michigan to develop and grow a sustainable energy efficiency market that thrives well beyond the three years of the program.
>Learn more about the Residential Program
>Learn more about the Commercial Program