Buildings are rarely built to use energy efficiently, despite the sizeable costs that inefficient designs impose on building owners, occupants, and the utility companies that serve them. The reasons for this massive market failure have to do with the institutional framework within which buildings are financed, designed, constructed, and operated: many of the roughly two dozen actors who play a role in this process have perverse incentives that reward inefficient practice. Fragmented and commoditized design, false price signals, and substitution of obsolete rules-of-thumb for true engineering optimization have yielded buildings that cost more to build, are less comfortable, and use more energy than they should.
In the United States alone, the unnecessary expenditures made over the past several decades on space conditioning equipment and the electricity supply infrastructure to run it total hundreds of billions of dollars. Investments in design education, leasing reform, elimination of perverse incentives for designers and engineers, and support of building commissioning and operation offer tightly focused, high-leverage opportunities to achieve important benefits relatively quickly.
In response to these opportunities, a “second generation” of utility DSM programs is already beginning to emerge, incorporating novel approaches such as direct incentives for building designers. At the same time, the ability to build and operate buildings that incorporate the best energy design features. |
