91ÊÓƵ

A sea change is under way in the building industry.

For a host of pressing reasons – melting polar ice, withering Midwest corn fields and American casualties from various missions to protect U.S. oil interests abroad – both homeowners and crafters of building code demand better building energy performance. After all, nearly half of U.S. energy is consumed by our buildings.

Meanwhile, the field of building science – our physics-based understanding of how buildings and their component parts function as interrelated systems – has advanced to the place where we can achieve revolutionary gains in energy performance at affordable cost.

We’ve got burgeoning demand. We’ve got the science. We should be engaged in a campaign of deep energy retrofits to transform the energy performance of our built environment, all supported by investments from public agencies and utilities. Unfortunately, it’s not happening. And at least part of the problem is that available energy efficiency incentives are supporting the wrong work in the field.

We’re suffering from a case of energy efficiency myopia, committed to incentives that reward homeowners for pursuing the most modest of energy improvements to their homes. We end up with slightly better insulated buildings, but often not meaningfully improved buildings.

This strategy is all in the name of capturing the “lowest hanging fruit,” but the approach has two major flaws:

1. Its tunnel-vision focus on incremental energy cost savings ignores the broader and equally important benefits brought by good energy retrofits informed by building science: indoor air quality, durability, comfort and quality of life.
2. It can act as a disincentive for the deeper, more transformative progress we all need to be making to improve the energy performance of our built environment.

Every time we retrofit a home, we’ve got maybe a once-in-two-decades opportunity to improve that building. If we limit ourselves to Band-Aid approaches we’ve failed in our responsibility as stewards of the built environment to capitalize on that chance and to revolutionize both the efficiency and livability of that structure.

I’m all for incentivizing home energy retrofits. In today’s economic climate homeowners need all the help they can get.  But we need not limit ourselves to incentives that fund only cost-effective energy improvements calculated at an unrealistically short payback period. These agencies’ singular focus on short-term energy improvements at the meter discourages the real, lasting change that will have a meaningful impact on the performance of our built environment and on people’s lives.

And let’s face it, if our energy efficiency retrofits don’t even reach the same level of performance as minimum code for new building (a disconcertingly low bar) then our methodology is flawed.

Let’s call on public agencies and utilities to take the dollars currently being spent on marketing and funding small, incremental improvements in energy efficiency and spend it on a campaign of deep energy retrofits guided by modern building science. Let’s reinvest in the envelopes of our buildings, super-insulate, air-seal and mechanically ventilate for a constant supply of fresh air. Let’s decommission those old wasteful, sometimes dangerous furnaces and replace them with super-efficient heat pumps at a fraction of the cost.

Let’s use the market power of incentives to encourage the changes in the built environment that our households and our planet demand.

Sam Hagerman co-founded the contracting firm , emphasizing sustainability in the built and work environments.