Obama's Economic Plan and the Home Improvement Industry

With President Obama's $787 billion economic stimulus, the obvious question became where, when, and how to best use this economic package. Public projects, such as highways, bridges, and mass transit, have taken the lion's share of money and political press, but the inherent risk of overlooking the home improvement industry is too large to ignore. Financially strapped homeowners have the least amount of spending power, while homes have arguably the greatest potential for positive long-term investment...

Overhead and Underfoot
Any investment in residential infrastructure has to start with green technology. The largest areas of potential growth reside overhead in the form of solar energy technologies and underfoot in the installation of fiber optic cables and geothermal heating and cooling. For solar energy, one of the biggest obstacles is more efficient energy use and storage, requiring among other advancements the creation of "smart grids." At the same time, the ability of geothermal systems to use the stable temperatures beneath the Earth's surface could virtually eliminate the vast energy consumption associated with residential heating and cooling.

Where to Begin Overhead: Green Cities
The best place to send the $1 billion requested by utility companies and environmental groups is where cities have already begun to invest money in smart-grid technologies. "Smart grids" is a catch-all phrase for digital energy grid systems that can interpret and react to information related to supply-demand fluctuations. This intelligence means less auxiliary generators need to be used, fewer and shorter power outages, better reaction to severe weather and natural disasters, increase the efficiency of solar panel integration, and allow systems to use the cheapest, cleanest form of available energy.

Boulder, CO is nearing completion of the first operational smart grid system in the country. Meanwhile, more ambitious projects associated with larger cities have begun in Austin, Houston, and Dallas and in California and the state of Washington. Not surprisingly, many of these areas are also known for the prevalence of solar and wind power technologies. Eventually, a modernized smart grid might be able to take the solar energy generated in west Texas and deliver it across the entire western United States.

Where to Begin Underfoot: Red States
Obama declared that bringing fiber-optic cables and inexpensive broadband service to rural areas of the country would be one of the priorities of the economic stimulus plan. Of course, much of rural America lies in the interior farmland between the Rocky and Appalachian Mountains. This region is also subject to a continental climate, characterized by large swings in seasonal temperatures—a nightmare in terms of residential heating and cooling. While digging and laying fiber-optic cables, the same construction crews could be trained to install geothermal piping. Given that the largest cost of installing a geothermal system is the digging and excavation of land, homeowners would have the option of installing one of these systems for a fraction of the cost of single, residential installation.

Demand within the Home Improvement Industry
Until now, geographic trends for incredibly energy-efficient geothermal systems have been focused in areas with wealthier homeowners (Connecticut, with the highest per capita income, also leads the way in geothermal installation) and homeowners in the Midwest states (Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Minnesota), who have some of the highest annual residential heating and cooling costs.

Solar panel installation does seem to follow the Sun with San Antonio, Orlando, Houston, and Atlanta leading the way for solar panel installation per capita. Yet, this trend within home improvement industry may have just as much to do with misconceptions about photovoltaic systems. Oregon, for example, is a leading state for photovoltaic implementation on a public scale. While it's true that sunnier places allow for greater harnessing capacity of photovoltaic power. But for homeowners, total energy demand for your home is just as important, if not more so. The mild summers and winters of the Pacific Northwest reduce peak energy demand for many homes, making them great candidates for photovoltaic systems.

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