Why Home Performance?

While building codes across the nation have been revised to reflect a growing concern for energy efficiency and sustainability, only a small percentage of Americans live in newer homes built using the latest green technologies. Converting our existing housing stock into energy-smart homes has the potential to reduce home energy consumption nationwide by at least 25 percent. And because future cost savings can be leveraged to pay for near-term efficiency improvements and renewable power generation, this major advancement of our national energy goals can be achieved with a relatively modest investment in the emerging Home Performance industry.

The Many Benefits

	Rising home energy costs present a significant hardship for many American families, particularly for low- and middle-income households and homeowners who have been hit by the recent home mortgage crisis. A cost-effective one-time retrofit can reduce residential energy bills by 25 percent or more, equivalent to an annual stimulus of about $500 per family.
	Home Performance retrofits offer the added benefit of improving indoor air quality, further enhancing comfort levels and potentially lowering health care costs related to asthma and other respiratory conditions.
	Improved insulation and sealing combined with efficient heating and air conditioning systems can ensure comfortable interior air temperatures while significantly reducing energy consumption.
	Widespread Home Performance retrofitting will create hundreds of thousands of green-collar jobs that cannot be outsourced to other countries. These new jobs will provide crucial economic stimulus as our nation struggles with high unemployment figures.
	Residential energy use accounts for more than 20 percent of U.S. carbon emissions. Cost-effective efficiency solutions that are ready for immediate deployment have the potential to reduce home energy consumption by 25 percent or more, lowering our nation's overall carbon emissions by 5 percent.
	The rapid return on investment (ROI) from basic energy efficiency measures will allow us to make long-term investments in the renewable energy technologies that are necessary to build a clean power grid. A combination of high-ROI energy efficiency and more costly clean generation technology will make large-scale deployment of renewable energy systems economically sustainable while requiring fewer government subsidies.