Building code energy efficiency dollar savings
Fierce Energy, February 28, 2014New research from Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) quantifies the financial savings from increased energy efficiency through building codes by evaluating the federal funding for the Energy Department’s Building Energy Codes Program, and comparing it to the energy savings over the past two decades.
For every $1 the DOE spent on building energy codes, $400 in energy cost savings resulted, according to PNNL.
The program was started in 1992 in response to the Energy Policy Act of 1992, which requires DOE to participate in the development of national building energy codes and standards. While the program received about $110 million in federal funding between 1992 and 2012, its efforts resulted in about $44 billion in energy cost savings, PNNL found. Those savings come from reducing national energy use by 4.8 quads or enough to power nearly 130 million U.S. homes for one year.