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White Roofs Are Green

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Come July, California law will require new residential sloping roofs to be light-colored cool roofs. Georgia and Florida already offer incentives to home owners who install white or light-colored roofs.

Why? White roofs are green.

White roofs keep things cooler naturally, so they save on air conditioning costs and cut carbon emissions. Painting your roof white could save as much as 20 percent of your air conditioning costs – that’s a savings of $1 billion per year in the US alone, considering that 90 percent of US roofs are black.

Even without incentives and mandates, white roofs make sense for California and Florida:

The ancient Greeks tapped into the natural cooling effects of white roofs from at least 1,000 years ago, if not longer. They used simple limestone pigments and a cleaning agent called “loulaki” ( “lilac”) with a distinctive blue color added to cut the brilliant radiance a bit for ease on the eye. While the ancient Greeks had no Cool Roof Council to give them the radiance ratings, now you do.

Here are the various energy reduction ratings for the top cool roofing paints that are currently available, through the Cool Roof Council. While a cool roof is no zero energy application the way that a solar powered roof is, cool roofs do make sense to help reduce cooling costs.

There are cool roof green rebates and tax breaks through the Recovery Act.  For details about the incentives, check the EPA’s articles on cool roofs.

Via Daily Green