By Nandita Bose and Timothy Gardner
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The Biden administration will make available nearly $3.2 billion from the bipartisan infrastructure law to help Americans lower home energy costs, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said on Wednesday.
Low-income Americans spend up to 30% of their paychecks on energy. This investment will help them afford improvements to their homes such as switching to better insulation and ventilation, installing energy efficient heating and cooling systems and upgrading lighting and appliances, she said.
“The $3.2 billion we are mobilizing today is about 10 times what we spend on retrofitting homes every year,” Granholm said. “That may seem like small changes, but actually they make a very big and immediate impact saving families hundreds to thousands of dollars per year,” Granholm said.
The current government program upgrades 38,000 homes annually. The additional amount will push that to 450,000 homes, she said.
In November, Biden signed into law a $1 trillion infrastructure bill that would create jobs across the country by dispersing billions of dollars to state and local governments to fix crumbling bridges and roads and by expanding broadband internet access to millions of Americans.
In 2021, the average nominal retail electricity price paid by U.S. residential electric customers rose at the fastest rate since 2008, increasing 4.3% from 2020 to 13.72 cents per kilowatt hour, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=51438 (EIA).
(Reporting by Nandita Bose and Timothy Gardner in Washington; Editing by Lisa Shumaker)
