New Building Performance Standards Coalition Aims to Pick up Where Building Energy Codes Leave Off | Article

The best time to make a building energy-efficient is when it is built. The second-best? Anytime after that.

Buildings of all types—houses, apartments and condominiums, shops in a strip mall, schools and hospitals, skyscrapers—account for more than one-third of total U.S. energy-related greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. That makes the building sector a major contributor to climate change. The impacts go up even more when you consider the embodied carbon emissions from construction, as materials are extracted, processed, manufactured, transported, distributed, and, eventually, discarded.

On January 21, the Biden-Harris Administration announced the launch of a nationwide coalition to boost a next-generation policy: building performance standards (BPS). The Building Performance Standards Coalition of 33 states and local governments represents about 22 percent of the U.S. population and accounts for about a fifth of total building footprint. Participation in the group involves a commitment to take administrative, regulatory, and legislative steps to advance BPS by Earth Day 2024.

While the details vary, the basic premise of a BPS is straightforward. A state or local government sets performance targets for existing buildings—by building type—for energy and water consumption, peak energy demand, and GHG emissions. Over time, these targets tend to apply to more building types—often starting with government facilities and large commercial buildings—and require improved performance compared to a baseline. Building owners generally have several years to plan before BPS targets apply and considerable flexibility to achieve compliance. Leading jurisdictions like Washington, D.C., and New York City began enacting BPS in 2018 and 2019, respectively. The federal government launched its own BPS in May 2021 as one of a series of efforts to decarbonize the power sector by 2035 and strengthen the clean energy workforce.

For decades before the first BPS, policymakers have had a wide range of policies at their disposal to help lower building sector emissions. States and local governments adopt and enforce building energy codes, for example, which regulate energy efficiency in new buildings and during major renovations (e.g., when a commercial building gets a new roof). The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) estimates that building energy codes will save about 900 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions through 2040.

DOE also sets energy efficiency standards for several dozen products, from air conditioners to pool pumps to water heaters, that are widely used in residential and commercial buildings. Standards are an especially potent policy that could lower carbon dioxide emissions by up to 2.9 billion metric tons through 2050. These policies require steady, predictable improvements in minimum levels of performance that add up to very big energy efficiency gains (and therefore very big GHG reductions).

Other policies have taken voluntary, incentive-based approaches to help households and commercial building owners become more energy efficient. Many utilities provide rebates and on-bill financing options to customers who buy and install high-efficiency heating and cooling equipment to replace broken models or want to install renewable energy systems. Since 1992, ENERGY STAR® has served as the backbone of many of these programs and, together with its partners, has delivered four billion metric tons of GHG emission reductions.

But building energy codes and voluntary programs have limitations. Building energy codes apply to new buildings rather than the many millions of structures built before modern codes were developed in the early-2000s. And voluntary programs are, as their name suggests, voluntary and highly dependent on whether individual building owners have actionable information (to make optimal decisions), affordable financing (to manage up-front costs not covered by incentives), and an expectation of a return on their investment (to justify spending money in the first place).

Given the magnitude of the challenge of reducing building sector emissions, new policies like BPS will be increasingly necessary. Ideally, as more jurisdictions adopt BPS, these policies will be developed and implemented to complement tried-and-true approaches. That would require continuous updates to building energy codes so new construction is increasingly energy-efficient. Meanwhile, voluntary programs backed by incentives like rebates and on-bill financing help households and commercial building owners make good decisions and wise investments. That way, no matter where a home or commercial building is in its life cycle, each building can become a source of GHG emission reductions rather than a contributing factor to the climate crisis.

Author: Daniel Bresette