Thirty states and the District of Columbia have adopted Renewable Portfolio Standards (RPS), policies that require or set goals for all energy supply to be renewable by a chosen date mostly within the next two decades. The Biden Administration earlier...
This blog was originally published on gettingtozeroforum.org on July 9, 2021. NBI is excited to welcome 20 students from college campuses across the United States and Canada to the inaugural cohort of the Next Gen program. Next Gen was designed...
With buildings currently representing 39% of U.S. carbon emissions from operational and embodied sources, jurisdictions look toward advanced building codes and policies as critical and urgent strategies for meeting their climate goals. Despite overwhelming support from public bodies, recent efforts...
Third-party rating systems like LEED have put pressure on building product manufacturers to disclose details about the environmental impacts of their products. In just the past 16 months alone, the environmental product declarations (EPDs) for concrete within the Embodied Carbon...
Clothes washer, shower, kitchen sink. These are the places where hot water lives. In fact, water heating accounts for a large share of energy use in buildings—up to 32% in single-family and multifamily homes. Today, the U.S. Department of Energy...
On his first day in office, President Biden recommitted the United States to the Paris Agreement, an international effort to address the climate emergency. In rejoining the Paris Agreement, the United States must define and commit to delivering greenhouse gas...
ACEEE’s 2020 State Energy Efficiency Scorecard was released in December with California reclaiming the number one spot from Massachusetts. This is based on five categories including utility and public benefits, transportation, building energy efficiency, state initiatives, and appliance standards, according...
In 2019, renewable energy provided more energy in the U.S. than coal. The last time this happened, in 1885, the Edison Electric Company had been running the first American central power plant for all of three years and was serving...
This is the second in a series exploring the COVID-19 pandemic’s relationship to buildings. In the first blog, Buildings’ Impact on Pandemics — we discussed how the building industry’s greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions can help fuel pandemics. These blogs are...
Urgency to address climate change, along with policy and market forces trending toward a smart, flexible grid, has led a growing number of utility efficiency program administrators to consider ways to increase support for energy-efficient, zero energy buildings. With the...
