Building resilience against extreme heat
A heat wave washed over the Northeast and the Ohio Valley these past couple of weeks, with about a quarter of the country under extreme heat alerts at its peak. Elevated on-the-ground temperatures were [...]
Floods threaten to wash away coastal communities
Atlantic hurricane season kicked off at the beginning of this month, and once again the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is predicting “above normal” activity. Specifically, NOAA forecasts that up to 25 named storms will [...]
Net metering policies are under fire
As of the 2020 Residential Energy Consumption Survey, about four million homes have solar generation capacity, amounting to about three percent of residential buildings in the country. The distribution of these homes is dependent [...]
Welcome ENERGY STAR NextGen, a certification for residential new builds
On May 7th, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced the launch of the ENERGY STAR NextGen new home certification program. This latest energy efficiency certification is a voluntary program aimed at residential new [...]
Utilities hope new fuels will save their gas grids
Across the country, states have been enacting legislation requiring gas and electric utilities to decarbonize their systems. Often, these bills complement statewide initiatives to reduce either total greenhouse gas emissions or specifically buildings-related emissions. [...]
What happened during the 2024 IECC development process?
On March 20, the International Code Council (ICC) finalized its residential and commercial building provisions for the 2024 International Energy Conservation Code (IECC), a reference code that many states consult for their statewide building [...]
Powering heating and cooling in prisons
At the federal, state, and local levels, there is a verifiable ongoing effort to electrify public buildings. Our last digest focused on states with “lead by example” electrification and decarbonization policies for their municipal [...]
Where and how states buildings are “leading by example”
According to Buildings Hub’s Market Factors dashboard, about 13 percent of total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions come from the domestic building stock. Additionally, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) estimated in 2019 that the building [...]
Why isn’t California’s building stock extensively electrified?
By nearly all accounts and measures, California is the most climate-forward state. California’s climate stances and policies set the tone for the rest of the country and, occasionally, for industry. For example, in 2018 [...]
New data and trends about the commercial building stock
Every few years, the Energy Information Agency (EIA) sends around the Commercial Buildings Energy Consumption Survey (CBECS), a national sample survey of commercial buildings and all of their energy-related characteristics and activities. The latest [...]