Green Loans Program

Green Loans is a new Australian Government initiative to help Australians tackle climate change.

The Green Loans Program will assist Australian families to install solar, water saving, and energy efficient products.

The Green Loans Program starts on 1 July 2009.

The Green Loans Program will provide:

detailed, quality Home Sustainability Assessments; and
access to interest free Green Loans of up to $10,000 each to make the changes recommended in the assessment.

Home sustainability assessments
Households are often overwhelmed by the amount of information available describing the best actions to save energy and water and to reduce greenhouse gases. It can be difficult to decide what action to take.

Free, independent assessment
Through the Green Loans Program, householders will be able to access a free, comprehensive Home Sustainability Assessment to reduce their energy and water bills, increase the comfort of their home and help reduce damaging carbon pollution.

This independent assessment by a qualified expert assessor will provide advice from the smallest behaviour change to major investments such as a solar hot water system or photovoltaic panels.

What will you get?
From this assessment, householders will get a tailored, expert report listing the most effective changes for their home.

The assessment will be valid for six months.

What is involved?
The assessment will involve the physical inspection of major energy and water systems relating to thermal comfort, water heating, lighting, refrigeration, cooking, entertainment, water efficiency and outdoor consumption, and waste management.

The data will be entered into a sophisticated assessment software tool to allow environmental impact calculations.

How long will it take?
The length of the inspection will be influenced by the amount of information readily available, the size of the property and the number of energy and water systems to be considered.

Each assessment should take around 1.5 hours to complete.

Green Loans Subsidy

Many households who take up a Home Sustainability Assessment may be interested in taking out a loan to undertake the home improvements suggested in the assessment report.

To assist these households, the Australian Government will lower the cost of finance by providing a loan subsidy to participating financial institutions.

This subsidy will cover the interest on borrowing of up to $10,000 for a period of up to four years.

The household can chose which participating bank, credit union or building society they wish to apply for a loan with.

Participating financial institutions will have to agree to national requirements for passing on the subsidy. This agreement will include safeguards to ensure that the full subsidy is passed on to the household through reduced cost finance.

The Department of the Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts is currently consulting the finance sector on the final arrangements. It is hoped that an interest free period of up to four years on eligible borrowing can be negotiated.

Awesome thanks for the post

yeah noticed this when i was looking around the gov site yesterday.. coming soon might be enough for a decent solar HWS or solar grid setup

we missed out on the rebate because of the 100k household cap..

I just had someone knock on my door last night about this. I hadn't heard of it before and thought that some others might not have either.

I'm doing renos, and having an interest free $10K just might be handy.
ohh...maybe those bamboo floors might be included????

Just checked the website, its too bad its not available to new builds as far as I can tell...

Which makes sense from a government perspective...the biggest efficiency gains with fairly modest investments would be made on the older stock of houses. Newer houses should have fairly high star ratings. I actually think the cutoff should be higher maybe three to five years before star ratings were so much in vogue.