Results from the Berkeley Lab show that weatherizing homes to uniform standard can achieve $33 billion in annual energy savings.
They found that upgrading all homes to be as airtight as the top 10 percent of similar homes (advanced tightening) would decrease energy demand by 2.6 quads annually—out of the total 22 quads of source energy used by the residential housing sector—leading to roughly $22 billion in savings in energy bills. Reaching the IECC standard would yield savings of 3.83 quads in annual source energy, yielding $33 billion in savings.
The study found that the IECC standard offered most of the benefit that the tighter standards would yield. Moreover this standard is likely more achievable than the tighter standards. According to their analysis, raising the U.S. housing stock to the IECC standard would reduce airflow in homes by a median value of 50 percent.
“As we move forward and look to build better housing stock, we want to know what standards we should enforce,” Logue said. “It looks like the IECC standard gets us the majority of the benefit of air sealing.”
Read the entire news release for the details.