State Treasurer Rob McCord expressed appreciation to State and Local Energy Report for recognizing the achievements of Pennsylvania’s Keystone Home Energy Loan Program (Keystone HELP) as the magazine announced the winners of its fifth annual Residential Energy Efficiency Awards Wednesday.

“It is great that the excellent work done by Treasury’s Keystone HELP team has been noticed by those who closely follow energy issues around the nation,” McCord said. “We are deeply proud of Keystone HELP, which so far has allowed more than 11,000 Pennsylvania families to save money while increasing energy efficiency—and creating jobs.”

State and Local Energy Report bestowed awards in four categories, and Keystone HELP won The Single-Family Award. The publication said the Pennsylvania program “has opened up new markets for these types of loans and increased access to private sector capital for home energy retrofits.”

Through Keystone HELP, Treasury makes low-interest loans available for high-efficiency furnace or boiler replacements, geothermal heating and cooling units, insulation installations, door and window replacements, and other measures to help Pennsylvanians conserve energy while saving on their residential energy bills.

Treasury’s sale earlier this year of several thousand Keystone HELP loans marked an important milestone in national efforts to develop a secondary market for such loans. A secondary market is seen by many industry experts as a critical step in making low-cost capital readily available to finance greater residential energy conservation improvements by homeowners, and the Keystone HELP sale was among the first of its kind in the country.

National energy leaders viewed Pennsylvania’s sale of debt for residential energy efficiency upgrades as a potential prototype that could provide valuable information about how secondary market investors can approach future deals.

McCord also thanked the state Department of Environmental Protection for its ongoing partnership with Keystone HELP across two administrations, and he expressed gratitude for valuable access to American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funding, which helps Treasury to offer the loans at low interest rates while still generating a market-based return for Pennsylvania.

For more information, visit the KeystoneHELP website.

5/20/2013