New program provides free home energy efficiency audits, retrofits for Detroit homeowners – Crain’s Detroit Business

Walker-Miller Energy Services has launched a program to provide free energy audits and energy-saving retrofits for low-income Detroit homeowners.

In a model akin to that of Toms Shoes, for every assessment purchased by a donor, Walker-Miller will donate one to a Detroit family companion home and help fund recommended energy saving retrofits for that home. The program provides a U.S. Department of Energy Home Energy Score and Building Performance Institute (BPI) assessment.

DTE Energy Co. has contributed $75,000 through the DTE Energy Efficiency Program as the first sponsor of the Detroit Energy Economic Partnership, which launched this week during Crain’s Detroit Business-produced Detroit Homecoming.

“Detroiters experience an energy burden where they are paying a significant amount of their income for bills,” said CEO Carla Walker-Miller.

According to the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy, 25 percent of low-income households in Detroit spend about 15 percent of their income on energy, she said.

The company is looking for Detroit homeowners who are willing to pay for an audit as a “donor home” to help fund the cost of companion audits for low-income homeowners in the city, as well as additional sponsors and donors. The Michigan chapter of the American Association of Blacks in Energy has agreed to serve as the fiduciary so the project can take donations.

Walker-Miller will look to community-based nonprofits to help select families that could benefit from the program and work to choose companion homes in the same district as the donor home, the company’s CEO said. The DTE sponsorship and additional funds from Walker-Miller will help fund audits and retrofits to improve energy efficiency like air sealing, insulation and furnaces and weatherization for 10 Detroit homes.

Audits typically run $200-$1,500, depending on the size of the home, Walker-Miller said.

About 80 percent of Detroit’s housing supply was built before 1960, Walker-Miller said, based on reports from the Urban Land Institute, “so the need for these retrofits is huge.”

“It is eye-opening when you have a BPI energy audit at your home because they really look deeply,” said Kerry Duggan, who served as Vice President Joe Biden’s energy, environment and climate change policy adviser and as deputy director of President Obama’s Detroit task force.

Duggan, a Crain’s 40 under 40 in 2018, lived in Washington, D.C., for 10 years before moving back to Detroit a few years back. She is serving as a consultant to Walker-Miller on the DEEP project.

Her Indian Village home and Walker-Miller’s home in Detroit’s Palmer Woods Neighborhood are among the first donor homes for the project.

Beyond the benefit to low-income home owners in Detroit, the DEEP program will create auditing and retrofitting jobs, Walker-Miller said.

The idea for the DEEP program was planted in 2015 during a conversation with Warren Buffet at Goldman Sachs’ 10,000 Small Businesses dinner in Detroit, Walker-Miller said.

She was sitting with Warren Buffet, Valerie Jarrett, a senior adviser to President Barack Obama,and U.S. Rep. Debbie Dingell.

Buffet asked Walker-Miller about her business and when she explained that her company did energy-saving audits and retrofits as a vendor to DTE Energy, Buffet mentioned \ it was probably about time to replace the windows in the house he’d lived in for almost 60 years.

As Walker-Miller explained that starting with the windows produced the worst return on investment in terms of energy savings, and simple things like air sealing, insulation and lighting upgrades have just as much or a bigger impact on the energy bill, Buffett, Dingell and Jarrett leaned in to listen more closely, she said.

It struck her at that moment that even people who have money, assets and resources don’t know how to make their homes more energy efficient.

That idea was the genesis of the DEEP program.

Last year,Walker-Miller went into 30,000 homes in Michigan, Ohio and Illinois last year to do energy efficiency audits and retrofits in areas like lighting, thermostats and low-flow shower heads, she said.

Original Source: https://www.crainsdetroit.com/energy/new-program-provides-free-home-energy-efficiency-audits-retrofits-detroit-homeowners