The briefing was part of a series of events scheduled during the High Performance Building Coalition's annual High Performance Building Week, an opportunity to engage stakeholders about the importance of high performance buildings. This year's theme, "Challenges and Solutions for Improving Resiliency, Workforce Development, Energy and Water Efficiency," united leading experts who gave feedback on cutting edge-trends in the building industry and areas in progress.
Pete DeMarco, EESCC's lead facilitator and the executive vice president of advocacy and research at the IAPMO GROUP, and Jana Zabinski, senior program manager at ANSI, highlighted EESCC's report detailing major progress of the standards community in advancing energy and water efficiency standardization. The EESCC Standardization Roadmap: Energy Efficiency in the Built Environment, originally published in 2014, detailed more than 100 gaps and associated recommendations for standards and codes needed to enable greater energy and water efficiency in the built environment. The 2016 Progress Report provides updated information on 71 of the 109 roadmap recommendations, indicating solid motivation within the standards community to close the gaps.
At the briefing, Ms. Zabinski noted that the goal of these reports — available as free resources on the EESCC website — is to bring clarity to the public and private sectors on what standards currently exist, detail standards development, and serve as a reference for additional standards needed. She also highlighted other ANSI collaboratives, which cover major sector areas including homeland security, nanotechnology, smart cities, and additive manufacturing. She emphasized that such collaboratives — including the EESCC — serve as a neutral forum for public- and private-sector stakeholders to come together and collaborate on standards-based solutions to national and global priorities.
The Congressional briefing underscored the importance of energy efficiency in the built environment, as the nation's buildings account for more than 70 percent of total U.S. electricity use and 40 percent of the nation's total energy bill at a cost of $400 billion dollars annually. Additionally, the DOE estimates that 20 percent of this energy is wasted, and that comparable reductions in energy could save $80 billion per year.
"Standards, as the technical underpinning of products, services, and systems, can be used to reduce costs, speed time to market, and accelerate the uptake of energy efficiency technologies," said Ms. Zabinski.
The DOE also reported its progress towards ANSI's EESCC Roadmap goals. At the briefing, Building Technologies Office (BTO) senior advisor and program manager Joan Glickman highlighted DOE's recent achievements in developing standardized tools and practices. As reported by the DOE, Ms. Glickman stressed that standard practices for measuring and reporting building energy efficiency information are vital to reducing energy use in our nation's commercial and residential buildings. "Collaboration among public, private, and non-profit stakeholders in developing standards is central to ensuring widespread uptake," the DOE reported in a recent blog post. "To achieve this end, DOE is committed to continued engagement with the American National Standard Institute's Energy Efficiency Standardization Collaborative."
For more information on the collaborative, visit the EESCC website.