SubscribeDue to a lack of pain, The Green Building Curmudgeon makes this, likely correct, prediction:
The big question is, what will happen to the home performance industy as incentives go away? It will probably fare better in regions with high energy costs, where paybacks are faster. Where energy audits or HERS ratings [...]
DemandSideSolutions
energy issues in the built environment
Category: the market
Withering away?
Lighting Uncertainty
I’ve been absent from the blogosphere for a while now. My apologies. Been feeling very busy and the last thing I’ve felt like doing after a long day of work has been to catch up on the industry news and sit in front of a computer. I could continue with additional excuses, but instead I’ll [...]
Insured Savings
Interesting comments from Tony. Good to see this level of sophistication in the commercial upgrade market:
A few weeks ago a business consortium including Lockheed Martin and Barclays Capital announced the largest single private-sector investment to-date for commercial property energy efficiency retrofits. The business consortium, referred to as the PACE Commercial Consortium, [...]
Enough Pain to Spend $$ on Upgrades?
I have come around to the view that “deep energy retrofits” in the residential sector are a pipe dream, at least at any sort of scale that is significant. Why? Well, they’re expensive, and utilities just don’t hurt most homeowners enough. The “pain” of most folks monthly bills isn’t large enough for them to justify [...]
Remember this is a business…..
from Chris Cheatham:
d5R: In the residential realm, a lot of builders and remodelers make green claims about their projects — e.g., energy-efficiency, sustainable materials, waste-management, etc. — but their projects do not necessarily have green certifications. Are they thus exempt from green building litigation?
CC: Absolutely not. If anything residential [...]
Decorative Lighting
I always thought that decorative/accent lighting would primarily be the domain of incandescent technologies, like this, but maybe I’m wrong?
Meeting Minimum Standards
It never surprises me when industry rises up to just meet a minimum standard. I actually think this is a very creative solution, especially until dimmable CFLs improve in performance or LEDs become more cost effective for screw-base luminaires.
Payback Doesn’t Matter
Laura at Not-YET-Green links to the annual Remodeling survey of improvements and their paybacks (as a function of recouped value at resale). What lesson can home performance pro’s draw from this body of knowledge? I think this data strengthens the case for home performance industry to sell things other than efficiency (comfort, durability, healthier indoor [...]
Kansas: Lessons Learned?
I was researching something on the energycodes.gov website the other day and came across a tidbit of information I wasn’t aware of. There are only a few states with no energy code on the books, one of which is Kansas. It takes this alternate route:
Homebuilders or realtors must disclose information about the home energy [...]
Millennials
Interesting commentary from ENR on future trends in the A/E/C world:
Call them Millennials, Generation Y or Generation Next—all these names are used—but demographers interviewed by ENR and many Millennials themselves agreed the names all try to classify a distinctive group of Americans born after about 1980 who are part of a wave [...]