Renewable You for 2024: Clean Energy Upgrades for Your New Year’s Resolutions

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As the confetti from New Year’s Eve celebrations settles, it is only fitting that we prepare our 2024 New Year’s Resolutions. Our resolutions are often about a change we wish to see in ourselves, but what about making them around the change we wish to see in our homes and our world?

Here’s how making energy-efficiency part of your 2024 New Year’s Resolutions could help you lower your energy costs and save our planet:

Resolution #1: Save Money 💵

Thanks to the Department of Energy’s Savings Hub, you can easily help determine what clean energy and energy efficiency incentives for home upgrades and appliances are best for you. Smart, energy-efficient upgrades like installing a heat pump or energy efficient lightbulbs can lower electricity costs. For example, a smart thermostat could save you 10 percent in annual energy costs. Air-source heat pumps can lower electricity usage for heating and cooling by nearly 65 percent. Tax credits for solar panels and other products can reduce purchase costs by upwards of 30% while also saving on monthly energy bills. Best of all, these upgrades save you money and our planet. If you’re still not sure how to get started, a Home Energy Audit from a local professional can help.

Resolution #2: Save the Planet 🌎

Clean energy improvements reduce your carbon footprint. Far too often, a community’s resilience is tested by severe weather and extreme natural disasters, exacerbated due to the climate crisis. Communities across the U.S. experience severe droughts, wildfires, and floods, displacing folks from their homes. While lowering emissions may not reverse some of the inevitable lasting impacts of climate change, reducing our emissions is a crucial step toward lessening the severity of climate change, safeguarding our ecosystems, and securing a more sustainable future for generations to come. Do your part to make Earth cleaner and reach President Biden’s goal of a 100% clean energy economy by 2050 by switching to clean energy. Reducing our emissions is a crucial step towards lessening the severity of climate change, safeguarding our ecosystems, and securing a more sustainable future for generations to come. Making home upgrades for 2024 is a great way to: cut your energy costs, conserve energy, reduce your carbon footprint, and heal the planet for future generations.

Resolution #3: Explore our principles of Energy Justice ⚡️

Through President Biden’s Justice40 Initiative, we’re directing at least 40 percent of the benefits of climate and clean energy investments to disadvantaged communities. This initiative creates good-paying jobs, revitalizes local economies, provides affordable, sustainable housing, boosts workforce development and training, promotes reduction of legacy pollution, and invests in critical infrastructure for clean water. There are 167 DOE programs under Justice40 that provide a pathway for equitable deep decarbonization that transforms and builds wealth in underserved/overburdened communities. As President Biden said, “We’ll create good jobs for millions of Americans … and we’ll do it all to withstand the devastating effects of climate change and promote environmental justice.” Learn how DOE is implementing this historic initiative and the kinds of investments that fall within the Justice40 initiative. Consider whether a research institution, company, nonprofit organization, Tribe, or other group you are part of could participate in these programs.

Making energy efficiency and sustainability part of your New Year’s resolutions opens a pathway to savings, community resilience, and a safer, healthier Earth for future generations to call home.

Courtesy of US DOE.