Posted on 06/16/2015 9:59:21 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
The federal government spent more than $4.28 billion in stimulus money on green upgrades to public buildings — but today, it has no idea if those huge expenditures actually made the facilities any more energy efficient.
“I don’t have the data to say that,” says Nick Goco, the General Services Administration’s deputy assistant inspector general for real-property audit. “To date, the system being used to evaluate the Recovery Act projects has not been fully populated with the data needed to evaluate the project. . . . We don’t know,” he says.
The GSA Office of Inspector General examined 45 full or partial upgrades to government buildings, funded by $2.47 billion in stimulus funds. Though each location was supposed to track data on energy-efficiency yields, many relied on “incomplete, outdated, and unverified data,” the inspector general’s report says.
Though the Energy Policy Act requires federal buildings to track consumption of energy by the hour, some of the buildings receiving stimulus funds had their meters disconnected for two months or longer.
“Businesses do energy conservation all the time, and they tend to do it fairly well, because it’s their money. With the government’s money, at the end of the day, they don’t care.” — Daniel Kish “I’m not surprised,” says Daniel Kish, senior vice president for policy at the Institute for Energy Research. “There’s little accountability. Whether it’s Solyndra or a myriad of other companies that have gone bad, the federal government just doubles down when they get it stupid the first time. Businesses do energy conservation all the time, and they tend to do it fairly well, because it’s their money. With the government’s money, at the end of the day, they don’t care.”
Goco says the inspector general will conduct another audit determining whether stimulus-funded green buildings are actually saving energy as promised.
But earlier reports call the effectiveness of the stimulus-funded green upgrades into question.
For example, in 2013, the inspector general’s office highlighted the waste of stimulus money at the Public Building Service’s regional offices in D.C. The agency spent $110,887 in stimulus money to pay a contractor for a roofing upgrade that was nixed before construction ever began.
The Public Building Service’s D.C. office also spent $877,152 on a remodel to create an open workspace, which it claimed would help move the office toward a “zero environmental footprint.” The agency said the upgrades would pay for themselves in 45 years. But the inspector general’s office said cost savings wouldn’t kick in for 4,617 years, noting the main purpose of the project appeared to be improving the regional commissioner’s office. Altogether, “these renovations were not a cost-effective use of Recovery Act funds,” the report concluded.
In another instance, the federal government spent $133 million in stimulus cash to install a “vegetative façade” at the Edith Green/Wendell Wyatt Federal Building in Portland, a project that was supposed to provide greener insulation. But as Senators John McCain and Tom Coburn noted in 2009, it cost roughly the same to install a similar façade at a much larger federal building in San Francisco, which raised questions about cost overruns in Portland.
“We do know one thing: It lined the pockets of a lot of Democrats,” says Peter Morici, a professor of business at the University of Maryland. “I don’t think you’ll find many people who voted for Romney on those projects. . . . I think [the buildings] are probably greener, but they’re probably not as green as they’re supposed to be. A lot of this technology doesn’t work out as planned.”
— Jillian Kay Melchior writes for National Review as a Thomas L. Rhodes Fellow for the Franklin Center. She is also a senior fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum.
Apparently it is impossible to look at utility bills pre conversion vs. post conversion.
Porkulus cluster-blank marxism.
Green: the new religion....just have faith.
Proof?? 0bama’s government don’t need no stinkin’ proof!
It takes a very special kind of person to take a perfectly good HVAC system and “upgrade” it to a green system. That very special kind of person is a person who doesn’t mind wasting other people’s money.
Yep. The nonsense that mechanical engineers specify and the contorted sequences are to be ridiculed. Not one can prove to me that all that saves a thing. But sometimes they get their name in some trade rag for how "cutting edge" their green and sustainable butts are.
If you want to see ‘green’ insanity one should head to a large German city. The Germans will spend a million euro to save 50 cents a month.
I have never found any energy saving in the “energy efficient” appliances that I have bought. The only time I saw an actual reduction in my power bill was when hubby had new windows and aluminum siding put on the house. Our bill did go down for a couple of months. Then the electric company raised rates and poof, gone were the savings and I was right back where I started.
Remember the money wasted on solar panels on the White House roof by Jimmy Carter?
Reagan had them removed as they were useless.
It would be easy to require third party audits after the upgrade. No one involved wants this as it may reveal the emperor has no clothes. It would however be a low cost method to determine how effective these programs actually perform.
Military bases also had to go green and I’m not talking fatigues.
“At a Pentagon news conference today detailing President Barack Obama’s proposed Pentagon budget for fiscal year 2015, Hagel called the reductions — including shrinking the Army to its smallest size since before World War II and eliminating an entire fleet of Air Force fighter planes — “difficult choices” that will change defense institutions for years to come, but designed to leave the military capable of fulfilling U.S. defense strategy and defending the homeland against strategic threats.
Under a Pentagon budget that will shrink by more than $75 billion over the next two years — with deeper cuts expected if sequestration returns in fiscal year 2016 — Hagel and other senior defense and military officials acknowledged that some of the budget choices will create additional risks in certain areas.”
posted 2/14/14
http://www.defense.gov/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=121703
The DoD is at the mercy of whomever is in the WH...and in this case, they’re being forced to knuckle under.
Our house was built in 1978 and has all the original doors and windows. Almost all our neighbors have replaced theirs with the newer vinyl double paned ones. I was thinking about it but after replacing all our appliances and not seeing one penny saved decided against it.
We have a clothesline and I started using it instead of the dryer. Not even that helped. No matter what I do our electric bill never ever goes down.
We even replaced our original ac/heater last summer. Guess what? Yep, our electric bill is the same.
My favorite “green” expenditure was the millions that Barry gave to Clinton crony/half-wit Terry McAuliffe so that he could build electric cars. There was no evidence that Terry had a clue about cars, but that didn’t prevent him from getting the cash.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.