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INTRODUCTION
THE CURRENT CLIMATE OF OpINION IN bOTH THE RESIdENTIAL and commercial sectors for new and existing building stock gives a prominent role to energy efficiency as a policy tool. Executive and legislative branches of government at both the state and federal levels are considering and adopting policy options to valorize energy efficiency in the service of everything from national security to curbing global warming to creating a green economy.While the authors support this activity, it should be noted that actual evidence regarding the benefits or outcomes of most funding initiatives or policy activity in this area remains difficult to assess meaningfully.1 Furthermore, the authors stress the need for validation of post-occupancy performance and demonstration of persistence of energy efficiency benefits attributable to energy efficiency initiatives and policy activities.
This article addresses a vital piece of the energy efficiency puzzle by providing a simple, yet viable, method for assessing actual performance using one well-known and nationally important green building rating system for homes: ENERGY STAR. Two previous articles, one by Jones and vyas published in Real Estate Issues, addressed some basic program evaluation issues and identified the need for a more robust method for determining how ENERGY STAR-certified homes were actually performing relative to comparable non-ENERGY STAR-certified homes.2 These earlier studies, though preliminary, pointed to challenges associated with data collection and analysis, both in terms of relative performance in the same geographical location and, more important, over significant time intervals.
To recap the conclusions of the previous articles, the ENERGY STAR homes in the sample (Mentone subdivision, Alachua County, Fla.) performed better than comparable non-ENERGY STAR homes (i.e., they used significantly less energy as measured in equivalent kilowatt hours to account for both electricity and natural gas consumption), but they suffered from a significant deterioration in performance over time. The earliest attempt (Smith and Jones) to quantify performance of a large set of certified homes showed that the sample ENERGY STAR homes were performing approximately fifteen percent better than non-certified homes. This showed the potential significance of ENERGY STAR to lenders and homeowners as a mechanism to decrease homeownership hard costs over the life of the home. This conclusion was of particular import for lower-income households. Therefore, results of the second study (Jones and...