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Fresh Food Initiative

The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania should amend the Fresh Food Financing Initiative in the following ways:

1. To encourage food stores to adopt sustainable practices, new funding should be added to the FFFI for grants and low-interest loans for high-performance energy measures and environmentally-green building products and building practices. These grants and low-interest loans would be available statewide for food stores participating in the FFFI and could be used for the design and construction costs for both new construction and renovation.

Example: Energy simulation modeling is necessary in building design to understand how complex energy systems interact and to maximize a building’s energy savings. However energy modeling is not standard practice for most architectural projects. High-performance refrigeration systems, windows, HVAC systems, combined heat and power systems and many other building products can produce significant savings in energy usages and costs, but usually carry a first-cost premium that discourages their use. Targeting these high performance measures for favorable financing will help demonstrate the performance advantages and cost savings of the systems to food retail operators, creating higher demand for these technologies within the industry at large.

See: Pennsylvania Fresh Food Financing Initiative Site Design: Adaptive Re-use/ Renovation; General Mechanical/Electrical System Design Strategies - Rebates Advanced; Technologies; Advanced Technologies: CHP Systems or Cogen

2. To encourage the use of the LEED standard, FFFI should provide a rebate for a portion of the administrative costs incurred in obtaining formal LEED certification for small-scale grocery stores.

Many municipalities have begun to utilize the US Green Building Council’s LEED certification standards to analyze the level of sustainability a particular building project will achieve as well as peg many of their development regulations and incentives to this measure. For larger commercial projects, the cost of initiating the certification process is relatively small. However, for smaller, neighborhood scale projects, those same costs can represent a prohibitive cost barrier to participating in the certification process.

See: Gaithersburg, MD Green Building Permit Rebate Program

Relevant Strategies: General Mechanical/Electrical System Design Strategies - Rebates

3. FFFI should educate store owners and developers about the existing federal programs and incentives that encourage the use of clean energy and high-performance technologies for food retail operators.

See: Modified Accelerated Cost Recovery System + Bonus Depreciation (accelerated depreciation for green equipment and technologies);
Energy Efficient Commercial Building Tax Deduction ($1.80 per sq. ft. for lighting, cooling, and heating projects that achieve a 50% reduction.); Business Energy Tax Credit (for renewable energy applications)
Energy Star Tax Incentive Primer (overview and resource links)

Relevant Strategies: General Mechanical/Electrical System Design Strategies - Rebates