A decades-old home weatherization program has become central to the administration’s plans to cut Americans’ power bills and lower fossil fuel emissions.
Amid surging inflation and energy price spikes, the Biden administration on Wednesday announced plans to spend roughly $3.2 billion to retrofit hundreds of thousands of homes in low-income communities with the aim of slashing Americans’ energy bills and greenhouse gas emissions.
The new funding from the $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill President Biden signed into law last year provides a massive boost to a federal home weatherization program that began during the 1970s oil crisis as a way to cut people’s heating bills. It allows funding to modernize eligible homes with cost-effective upgrades, adding insulation to attics, swapping older refrigerators and other appliances for new, more efficient models, and replacing leaky windows and doors.
Biden officials said the infusion of funding, a tenfold increase compared to the program’s current budget, means it will be able to serve 450,000 households total. It currently retrofits about 38,000 homes a year.
