The Biden administration’s inflation-reduction bill delivered incredible savings to homeowners, with taxpayers demanding over $8 billion in incentives for climate-friendly home renovations, the Washington Post reports.

The IRA has many facets, including tax credits and rebates. The bipartisan Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation estimated that they would total $2.4 billion in the first year, rising to $4 billion per year over the next two years.

According to the Post, people in the U.S. have started adopting energy-efficient technologies much faster than expected. In most states, 2 to 3 percent of households took advantage of these incentives. Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont lead the way at 4 percent, and only Oklahoma and West Virginia are below 2 percent.

Rebates and tax credits were available for a range of energy-efficient upgrades. For example, one tax credit was designed to cover 30% of the cost of solar panels and batteries. The average household that installed these devices and claimed the credit received $5,000 back, totaling $6 billion nationwide, and that was just one of the credits available. Homeowners could also receive incentives for installing heat pumps, installing insulated windows and improving their home’s insulation in other areas.

“The reality is that the American people want to adopt solar panels, heat pumps and electric vehicles, and the federal inflation control law helps them do that,” said Leah Stokes, a political scientist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, according to the Post.

All of these improvements are beneficial to both the homeowner and the environment. According to the Post, a typical household that purchases solar panels saves $2,000 annually in energy costs, and heat pump users save up to $3,000 per year.

At the same time, the more gas and propane heaters are replaced by electric ones and the more dirty energy from the power grid is exchanged for solar energy, the less polluted the atmosphere will be.

One of the main reasons taxpayers demanded higher incentives than expected, Stokes said, may be because states also created incentives to sweeten the deal for buyers, as the Washington Post revealed.

“We’ve seen ups and downs in the past, which suggests that these tax credits have a stimulatory effect on the market,” said Sara Baldwin, senior researcher for decarbonization at Energy Innovation, according to the Post.

In other words, tax breaks lead to greater use of cost-saving and energy-efficient technologies – and that is encouraging news.

If you want to take advantage of these tax incentives yourself, you should start by contacting the nonprofit Rewiring America. This group’s free tools will help you find vendors, compare options, and get government incentives for your project.

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