Green New Deal Plan

Green buildings and housing for all

There is a housing crisis in this country, and at the same time, buildings use a significant percentage of energy, and their placement far from each other necessitates the use of cars. This program is designed to take care of all three problems at once, by buildings tens of thousands of apartment buildings and also thereby reviving main streets, and making buildings energy self-sufficient.

There are two main ways to make buildings energy self-sufficient: by using solar panels on the building to generate electricity, along with a storage battery to store some of that electricity if possible; and drastically decreasing the amount of energy needed to heat and cool a building, either with geothermal heat pumps installed in the ground, or with retrofitting a building.

Some buildings are so large that they would not be able to provide for all of their electrical needs from solar panels on the roof, so their electricity would mostly have to be provided by the Interstate Renewable Electricity System. But they could still have enough battery storage to provide up to 10 hours of electricity, and since almost all buildings would be hooked up to the Interstate, this battery storage capability would make the entire national system more resilient and reliable.

This plan assumes that each building would have their own combination of solar, geothermal, battery, and retrofitting that was most efficient for its particular circumstances.

Reading list:
New Strategies for Smart Integrated Distributed Energy Systems, taken from Vice article