Accelerating Decarbonization in the United States Technology, Policy, and Societal Dimensions (2024) / Chapter Skim
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7 The Built Environment Abstract: The planning, design, construction, maintenance, and disposition of the built environment creates more than 40 percent of U.S. energy demand and resulting greenhouse gas (GHG)
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community infrastructures that integrate buildings more comprehensively with transportation systems and the grid. INTRODUCTION The committee's first report highlighted the built environment of the United States -- the millions of individual homes, offices, schools, and other facilities as well as the communities and infrastructure that serve and connect them.
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Third, the committee believes that more aggressive actions are needed and possible from buildings than what is projected in the original report's targets, what is enabled with IRA funds, and what is stipulated even under current White House ambitions. The building industry's proven capacity to adapt, combined with the urgent co-benefits to occupant health and reduced cost burdens as well as community economic development, demand that our nation's decarbonization strategy center the built environment more squarely.
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Last, the committee provided specific measurable targets for one strategy toward these decarbonization goals. The primary technological vehicle for reaching the report's targets is the electrification of space and water heating; the report set a target of increasing electric heat pumps' share of heating and hot water equipment to 25 percent in residential buildings and 15 percent in commercial buildings by 2030 (NASEM 2021a, p.
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Emissions from buildings have already been falling since 2005 due largely to increases in energy efficiency even though both the number and size of residential and commercial buildings have continued to increase. The potential for much deeper emissions reductions is large.
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proposed for other sectors, nor is it compatible with the usual functional life cycle of energy-consuming equipment and appliances in buildings or the turnover in building ownership. 2 100F TABLE 7-1 Recent Annual Total and Building Average Primary Energy Consumption Energy Sources (millions of BTUs)
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and appliances and often with their own energy production potential via distributed, building-level renewable energy installations. Consequently, the average energy consumption (and certainly the energy intensity)
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TABLE 7-3 Average Annual Residential Energy Consumption by Year of Construction, 2015 Fuel Oil/ Year of Construction All Fuels Electricity Natural Gas Propane Kerosene (millions of BTUs) Before 1950 88.7 30.1 65.3 34.5 68.7 1950 to 1959 84.4 31.7 60.3 26.9 79.9 1960 to 1969 75.0 32.5 53.9 26.3 63.2 1970 to 1979 70.3 36.7 52.2 28.0 64.3 1980 to 1989 65.7 37.5 48.0 25.8 58.6 1990 to 1999 78.3 42.3 60.2 29.8 62.0 2000 to 2009 78.2 43.8 59.1 40.9 63.6 2010 to 2015 67.0 39.8 51.7 31.2 NOTES: The "All Fuels" category includes consumption for biomass (wood)
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policy as noted later in this chapter, then, is well founded. 3 Approximately 69 percent of all carbon-based 101F energy consumed in homes is used for space heating, 24 percent for water heating, and another 3 percent for cooking (Table 7-4)
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buildings from 5 years prior in which only 10 percent of homes contained heat pumps (EIA 2018)
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were using carbon-based fuels for space heating beforehand, this would result in a 14.4 percent reduction in total demand for those fuels. In short, although the heat pump revolution is already happening and adaption rates are increasingly meeting the committee's original targets or the new national projections, it is not happening fast enough to meet the broader goals of reductions carbon-based energy demands or overall energy demand.
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to decarbonization goals. 7 Assuming an accurate estimate lies between currently measured ranges, the 105F increase in appropriations recommended by the committee would lead to about 105,000 homes being weatherized per year for an additional nearly 0.95 million homes by 2030 since the first report.
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(Kresowik and Reeg 2022)
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Significant intervention is needed to make up the gaps between current conditions, the committee's more detailed intervention targets, and the committee's broad goals for 2030 as stated in the first report. This holds true for all the quantified gaps in overall energy efficiency (particularly for the least efficient older building stock)
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of interventions. This change will likely increase the number of those building types given the added program resources that can be used for their weatherization, although at the expense of prevailing wage benefits.
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billion set of competitive grants for "green banks" that could finance distributed community energy projects as well as household efficiency and electrification programs. Finding 7-5: The new federal policy terrain helps to fill the gaps or, more accurately, expedite the achievement of several of the committee's original targets.
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and programs have focused on the reduction or near-elimination of carbon-based fuels in new construction -- that is, electrification -- though energy efficiency improvements by regulation as largely represented by state adoptions of model energy codes for new buildings have been the much longer policy vehicle (Berg 2022; Berg et al.
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has also set goals for the installation of heat pumps and set aside funds for this effort. Other jurisdictions are following suit, although often relying on direct funding or financial incentives to encourage property owners to convert in addition to strict mandates for the equipment (Cohn and Esram 2022)
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Recommendation 7-3: Expand and Evaluate the Weatherization Assistance Program (WAP)
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much energy is produced for buildings than is used by them -- making the building sector alone one of the biggest end use sectors for carbon-based fuels. Electricity used within buildings account for 74 percent of total retail electricity sales and the emissions related to producing and delivering that power -- well beyond the "Scope 1" emissions associated solely with buildings' direct use of energy.
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NSF, HUD, and GSA all have a role to play in identifying important social-science, engineering, economic, and legal research and policy analysis questions. Building Policies and Actions for Rapid Decarbonization in the United States Policies, incentives and investments in new and existing buildings and community systems can improve individuals' quality of life while offering the deep carbon savings needed to reach carbon neutral targets.
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electric motors, transformers, air compressors, and packaged unitary air conditioners and heat pumps. An NREL study found that efficiency improvements in the range of 0.5 to 2 percent per year for electric building technologies could completely offset the electricity load growth associated with building electrification for decarbonization (Steinberg et al.
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To achieve net-zero energy use intensity in all new residential and commercial buildings by 2030, a full suite of subnational actions would need to be advanced state by state: (1) ASHRAE, Zero Code, and IECC2021 code adoption; (2)
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target for building type and is adjusted for climate. This graph charts zEPI scores for the current national model energy codes and standards.
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FIGURE 7-3 Zero Energy Buildings in MA: Saving Money from the Start | 2019 Report. SOURCE: Courtesy of BE+, USGBC MA (2019)
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national energy consumption for space heating and cooling by 1.4 percent and saving residents an average of 8 percent on their heating and cooling bills (Barbour 2021; EnergyStar n.d.; Walton 2022)
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comprehensive carbon accounting. New research and development are needed to advance design, engineering and manufacturing of building assemblies and systems that can be produced with reduced greenhouse emissions (or even negative emissions in the case of some alternatives to concrete and steel)
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5. Incentivize Mixed-Use Walkable Infill Instead of Sprawl Communities.
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The IRA and IIJA contain a number of programs that would modify urban and suburban land use policies, including $1.893 billion in a Neighborhood Access and Equity Grants Program (IRA §60501) to reconnect communities separated by highways and other infrastructure, and $1.5 billion for grants under the Urban and Community Forestry Assistance Program (IRA §23002)
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employment. The synergies created by bundled community-scale retrofitting would provide significant benefits, not evident in separate analyses of each option alone.
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decrease the area of dark, paved, concrete surfaces, and increase the number of reflective, vegetated, and porous surfaces, which reduce absorption of shortwave solar radiation, improve rainwater management, and support evaporative cooling (Strohbach et al.
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8. Innovate and Deploy Community and District Thermal Energy Systems Including Combined Heating, Cooling, and Power.
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Grid Actions for Integrating the Built Environment in Rapid Decarbonization More than 70 percent of the nation's electricity is consumed by or within a building (Figure 7-7a; DOE 2015; EIA 2023b; EPA 2023) and buildings offer the opportunity to play a critical role in supporting grid stability.
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• New grid infrastructures that meet multiple performance and decarbonization goals.
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FIGURE 7-8 Accelerating U.S. investments in building and community PV is key to competitiveness.
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FIGURE 7-9 Efficiency, distributed PV, load flexibility, and thermal storage can flatten peak electricity demand and ensure resiliency. SOURCE: Courtesy of Matt Jungclaus, Cara Carmichael, and Phil Keuhn, Value Potential for GridInteractive Efficient Buildings in the GSA Portfolio: A Cost Benefit Analysis, Rocky Mountain Institute, 2019.
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There is an equally critical need for national investment in RD&D of low-carbon and smart technologies, and systems for homes, commercial buildings, and GEBs with distributed renewables and storage. Beyond the building level, there is the challenging but transformational pursuit of community level decarbonization of buildings and community infrastructures including incentivizing mixed-use walkable infill instead of sprawl communities; accelerating building and community renewables; and innovating in addressing low temperature thermal (heating and cooling demands)
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this chapter describes, there is a much greater potential for emissions reductions from the built environment if even more ambitious strategies for reducing energy demand and more tightly weaving building technologies into the broader energy system. IRA, IIJA, and state and local policies have initiated this transition and suggest ways in which the committee's first recommendations need to be revised.
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upgrades for energy efficiency and electrification for an additional decade. Larger incentives must be allotted to building audit services and to owner and occupant service management to ensure the technologically appropriate selection and installation order of decarbonization technologies that are suited to the housing unit and household or owner capacity.
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Actor(s) Responsible for Sector(s)
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September 2022. https://www.aceee.org/sites/default/files/pdfs/home_energy_upgrade_incentives_9-27-22.pdf.
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Bundesverband Solarwirtschaft e.V.
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DOE (U.S. Department of Energy)
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Harding, T
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Litjens, G
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Palmer, K., and M Walls.
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Tonn, B., E
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