As a commercial building owner you know that maintaining your building’s operations can be a significant financial burden. It can be particularly painful when you have to use capital for maintenance and improvement instead of using that money to grow your business. But what if you could make necessary HVAC and Building Controls upgrades without touching your own capital?
Let’s take a brief look at two ways you can do just that: by taking advantage of tax incentives and utility rebates.
Tax incentives are often overlooked as a funding resource for projects. Often building owners (both non-profit and for profit building owners) aren’t aware that they can make improvements to their buildings and take the tax deduction to offset project costs. There are actually a number of ways these tax incentives can work, including credits against your federal and state taxes. In some cases you can also receive relief on property and sales taxes.
There are currently more than 50 programs available in Ohio. Indiana has 66 such programs, and there are 49 different programs available in the state of Kentucky. For more specifics, we invite you to check out the national website for the Database of State Incentives for Renewables and Efficiency (DSIRE).
Utilities rebates are another source of funding for building improvements that allow you to upgrade your facilities without tapping into your working capital. Generally these rebates come in the form of prescriptive or custom rebates.
- Prescriptive rebates provide building owners with a prescribed menu of rebates that are based on replacing equipment in your building with specific energy-saving equipment.
- Custom rebates, on the other hand require a design review in which the qualifying project generates a specific dollar rebate based on the cost of the installment project and the energy savings projected from the improvement to your building.
How it works is that utility rebates monies are collected by utility rate payers and redistributed to building owners through prescriptive or custom rebates. In some cases custom rebates can be as much as 75 percent of the installed cost of the equipment! That’s a significant savings that drops right to your bottom line—whether you’re installing building automation controls, upgrading commercial HVAC systems or implementing other unique energy-efficient technologies.
Click here to see specific examples of rebates and incentives in Ohio and Kentucky—all available from Duke Energy.
Here are just some examples from just one utility in Ohio varying types of qualifying projects where you can take advantage of tax incentives or utilities rebates to free up your working capital.
