New Funding Opportunities in a World of Rising Costs

What is crystal clear to facilities managers and school business officers is that they are facing a winter of sky-high energy costs that will put significant pressure on school budgets. What they may not also have their eyes on is how the state’s climate goals, the new building code, and new policies governing building emissions may soon impact their facilities. Good decision-making requires looking out at this evolving policy horizon.

At the Massachusetts Facilities Administrators Association and Massachusetts Association of School Business Officials Fall Conference in Worcester, we talked about the opportunity to protect school budgets from rising energy prices, the important role of the state’s 181 million square feet of school buildings in the state’s climate goals, and policies on the horizon that will push all buildings to electrify.

Chris Pimentel from Centrica offered his expertise on financing solutions for whole-school building retrofits and Tracey Ogden shared learnings from her vast experience with ground-source heat pumps. Tracey is working with higher education leaders across the state to install ground-source heat pumps.

Our K-12 schools can do the same with significant new federal and utility incentives.