Time to support Energy Performance Score
Every car has one. Every appliance has one. Why don’t houses have one? I’m talking about an energy rating. For decades, the biggest energy consuming products have been required to meet energy standards and to display some form of energy use in plain sight.
Consumers need the skinny to make informed choices. Ignorance is the enemy of a free market.
I wrote about one such rating system several weeks ago, called Energy Performance Score (EPS). Energy nerds across the nation are buzzing with the possibilities. Professional conferences, such as RESNET, have dedicated a large portion of their agendas to the topic. The State of Oregon recently passed legislation (SB 79) that established a working group to figure out how to implement the idea. The City of Seattle is running a pilot program that will assign EPSs to about 5,000 homes. Cities and states across the nation are jumping on the bandwagon.
The idea recently made it through the first round of a competition on Change.org and has now moved to the final phase. The winning idea gets an audience with the White House. This kind of exposure is just what the concept needs to make a real difference. If you would like to see energy ratings for houses, please vote for We Must Change Energy Behavior – An MPG Rating for Your Home.
Comments
One Response to “Time to support Energy Performance Score”
Leave a Reply
-
Recent Posts
- Air-to-water heat pump might be fixed
- Air-to-water heat pump failure
- Energy conservation first then solar: the sequence for success
- $20 a Gallon
- Time to support Energy Performance Score
- Ductless heat pumps perform well in cold weather
- Building hypocrisy in the Malibu hills
- Can passive solar and hydronic radiant heat live together?
-
Categories
-
Archives
-
Links
- Receive new comments. - RSS Feed of the Oikos Blog - Receive new posts via RSS.
-
Meta
I agree that the Energy Performance Score is a great idea–with one caveat. It disadvantages older houses, which were not designed to work with modern heating and cooling systems, but which do have many sustainable features. When people evaluate a house based on a simple EPS alone, they may avoid old houses, or worse, demolish them, or discard elements such as old windows, etc. I think the EPS should also include information about the estimated EMBODIED ENERGY in a given house, and also a score relating to their LOCATION relative to public transit. This would give the buyer/appraiser a more accurate picture of a building’s sustainability. Old houses can always be made more energy efficient, and often their sustainable features make up for the gap in their energy performance and that of new construction.