Financial Incentives Archives | Green Built Alliance

Douglas Ager: Sweet Spot: Custom Home Balances Comfort and Environmental Responsibility

Sweet Spot: Custom Home Balances Comfort and Environmental Responsibility By Douglas Ager Mike Herrick loves Western North Carolina for the area’s temperate year-round climate, and his wife Ellen wanted to live closer to their grandchildren on the east coast. But their shared goal when building their new custom house...

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Affordable for the Long Haul: Habitat Tests New Style of Housing in Curry Court

Affordable for the Long Haul: Habitat Tests New Style of Housing in Curry Court Ariane Kjellquist On 2.7 acres in Candler, not far from shopping and services, is a thriving community of 12 certified Green Built Homes created by Asheville Area Habitat for Humanity. Previously the site of five abandoned...

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Planting for Future Generations: A Journey Toward Bioregional Food Resilience

Planting for Future Generations: A Journey Toward Bioregional Food Resilience Danu Macon For millennia, the land we know as Western North Carolina has nourished and provided a home for thousands of species of animals, plants and fungi. The web of life here in these mountains contains a grand diversity...

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Tom Owens: Certifying it Twice

Certifying it Twice: High-Performance Home Receives ENERGY STAR® 3 and Green Built Homes Certifications Tom Owens Clients came to us a few years ago in search of someone who could both design and build a home that would be environmentally friendly, energy efficient and structurally durable. They had a...

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Leigha Dickens: Coulda, Would, Shoulda

Coulda, Woulda, Shoulda: (Flawed) Reasons People Don’t Use Green Building Certification Programs Leigha Dickens If I had a dollar for every time a client chose not to certify their custom new home through a third-party green-building program, then I’d have more dollars than you might think. Even among clients...

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Lee Warren and Richard Freudenberger: Sustainability Simplified

Sustainability Simplified: Ten Solutions In and Around Your Home Lee Warren and Richard Freudenberger Life is full. We understand. That’s why we made a list of sustainability solutions that are easy, fun, and hopefully doable. If you pick three to implement each year for three years, then you’ll nearly...

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Cari Barcas: Setting the Course for Clean Energy

Setting the Course for Clean Energy: Blue Horizons Project Empowers Community to Conserve Energy and Preserve Region By Cari Barcas Resulting from a two-year collaboration between local government, business, nonprofit and environmental leaders, the Blue Horizons Project is a comprehensive hub of energy-efficiency programs to empower community members to...

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Garret K. Woodward: Filling in the Gaps

Filling in the Gaps: Energy Savers Network Helps Low-Income Homes Garret K. Woodward It was the basketball-sized hole in the dining room window that stuck out the most for Alice Wyndham. “It was the second house we worked on. He was a veteran who had cancer. His mother had...

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Amy Musser: Heat Pump Revolution

Welcome to the Heat Pump Revolution: The Benefits of Variable-Speed Heat Pumps Amy Musser Sometimes the green-building industry evolves quickly, with a product making a quantum leap in efficiency. This is happening in 2018 with variable-speed heat pumps. These have been on the market for a couple of years,...

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Ned Ryan Doyle: Advanced Metering Infrastructure

Advanced Metering Infrastructure: The Next Generation of Energy Metering Comes to WNC Ned Ryan Doyle AMI, shorthand for Advanced Metering Infrastructure, is being rolled out in the Western Carolinas this year for Duke Energy customers and is projected to be completed by mid-2019. So, what is AMI? Why does...

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