Dec 17, 2024 _ news

Our IRA Calculator Finds Funding Opportunities for Healthcare Projects

Our IRA Calculator now calculates funding opportunities for healthcare projects! Our popular tool, developed with CMTA, helps our clients—including healthcare clients—understand funding opportunities in the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) for sustainable design

While the goals of the IRA are generally understood among people in the building industry, we’ve found they frequently don’t understand its details or the opportunities to support sustainability that it holds. This can be especially true in healthcare design where environments are highly regulated. So, we set out to update our easy-to-use tool to help all industries understand the financial impact of different sustainability strategies.

By answering a brief series of questions about the sustainability features your project may include—for example, does it use renewable energy or high-efficiency HVAC systems—you can discover potential funding opportunities.

“The IRA calculator is a bit like a mortgage calculator,” says GBBN Director of Sustainability & Resilience, Tiffany Broyles Yost “Without having to review the legislation yourself, it can help you figure out a sustainability strategy that makes sense for your project. We’re excited to have this tool updated for healthcare projects as well.”

For this update, the team that developed the IRA Calculator tested it again using several real-world healthcare case studies and found that individual projects can be eligible for hundreds of thousands (or even millions) of dollars in incentives to support sustainable design.

“This is great news,” explains Tiffany. “With lower operational costs and increased resilience, healthy, sustainable design is frequently more attractive over the long-term, but higher upfront costs often lead people to sacrifice these long-term outcomes to make the financing work in the short-term.”

The IRA Calculator is not a substitute for professional tax advice, but it can help developers take the right questions to their financial team.