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US loses opportunity with home energy efficiency

Posted on 28. Jan, 2010 by GMS Editor in Newsflash, ShowOnLatestPanel

By Andrew McGlashen
for the Daily Climate
25 January 2010
EPA makes gains with Energy Star program, but US housing stock remains woefully ’sick.’

EAST LANSING, Mich. – Krista and Micah Fuerst were looking near here to buy their first place together, and had narrowed it down to two houses: One built 25 years ago of standard materials, the other brand new and built to strict energy efficiency standards.

The couple’s choice was easy: They picked the Energy Star home, the U.S. Environmental Program’s top energy ranking.

But they’re in the minority.

About 17 percent of new homes built in 2008 earned the Energy Star label. The proportion – which is expected to reach 20 percent when 2009’s figures are tallied – marks a five-point increase from 2007 and “indicates such incredible success,” said Sam Rashkin, national director of the program’s section for homes.

Home energy use accounts for 16 percent of the United States’ greenhouse gas emissions.

Despite the EPA’s gains, some 99 percent of American houses are “sick” – damp, drafty, dusty, noisy and expensive to heat and cool – and “could be made at least 30 percent more energy-efficient with highly cost-effective, tried-and-true energy-efficiency improvements,” according to Rashkin.

The Energy Star program won’t solve this. Energy Star is meant to reflect the cream of the housing stock, and thus, program officers say, will always represent a minority of American homes.

Experts say economics and regulations are the root of the problem: Mortgages are structured in ways that fail to recognize efficiency’s benefits, while a patchwork of inconsistent and ill-enforced energy codes provides conflicting signals to industry.

Before the mortgage crisis, when loans were easier to come by and energy was relatively cheap, energy-efficient mortgages weren’t very enticing, experts say, and lenders didn’t bother with them. Now the specialized options are more valuable, but lenders have grown accustomed to ignoring them.

“It’s really unfortunate,” said Jennifer Amann, buildings program director for the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy. “Energy-efficient mortgages have been available now for 20 years or so, but they’re a really underutilized tool.”

Sam Rashkin agrees.

“We need a massive education of how to use energy-efficient mortgages, now that they can offer a meaningful solution,” he said.

While energy-efficient mortgages are a good idea, there’s a more obvious solution, according to Cliff Majersik, executive director of the Institute for Market Transformation, which advocates for energy efficiency:

Make all mortgages – not just specialized ones – account for energy use.

“The fact is that energy-efficient homes have much lower foreclosure and delinquency rates. So that’s a market failure, that we’re not giving homeowners credit for buying good, efficient homes,” Majersik said. “The challenge is that there are processes that have been in place for a long time, and there’s pretty clear evidence that they’ve let us down.”

Advocates also say national efficiency efforts have been let down by the codes that set minimum requirements for efficiency.

“Energy codes have existed for a long time, but they haven’t really done anything,” said Aleisha Khan, executive director of the Building Codes Assistance Project, a coalition that helps state and local governments implement efficiency requirements.

Certification programs like Energy Star “pull the market” by spearheading efficiency efforts, “and then you’ve got codes, dragging up the bottom,” she said. “Code is not Energy Star. Code is common sense.”

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Tags: energy efficiency, home retrofits