Business View Magazine - July 2016 109
us had anything to do with home construction.” And
yet when the City of Dunedin and the Pinellas, Florida
Housing Authority put out an RFP for 25 town homes
to be built in Dunedin, they bit. “That was about four
or five years ago,” he continues. “We bid for that with
some construction partners. Zero-energy had never
been done before in that climate - 160 thousand,
180 thousand dollar town homes that are high-perfor-
mance and zero-energy with solar, home automation,
LED lighting - all the goodies.”
Salmi’s group did get a piece of the Dunedin contract,
but the market wasn’t cooperating. The land was in a
Florida land trust, and there were no mortgages being
offered for homes planned for the area. In addition,
the objective of the RFP was to keep the housing af-
fordable; high-performance, zero-energy homes could
always be built for the high end buyer, but never for the
lower tiers. “So, the project kind of stalled and stalled,
but it finally got re-started about mid-year, last year.
And now, we have just about finished the first building
and the first five units will be done in the next three
weeks and then the rest of the buildings will be fin-
ished in two or three month intervals.”
So, what is a high-performance, zero-energy home,
anyway? “You have a zero-energy home if your home
produces as much or more energy as the home con-
sumes in the course of a year. You will not have any en-
ergy costs,” Salmi says. And who gets to decide what
zero-energy even means? “The Department of Energy
set the guidelines for zero-energy homes; this is not
something that we invented,” he replies. “Basically,
every single home gets energy calculations as to what
kind of energy consumption it’s expected to have. It’s
like the MPG (miles per gallon) for cars. There is a
third-party entity that comes in and they do the energy
calculations. They say, for example, ‘this home is going
to have a thousand kilowatt hours per month’ – that’s
the consumption for the home.”
Once a home model is rated, Greenergy provides those
AT A GLANCE
WHO:
Greenergy Communities
WHAT:
A builder of zero-energy, affordable homes
WHERE:
Headquarters in Seminole, Florida
WEBSITE
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