EEBA Academy

Once homebuyers purchase new homes often based on infatuation with community and design, bad home performance experiences can negate all the hard work earning customer satisfaction. It is critical to get high-performance right. This course begins that process with lessons-learned from decades of experience as a residential architect and work with thousands of home builders while serving as national director for ENERGY STAR Certified Home and Zero Energy Ready Home. The resulting framework for high performance homes includes five key strategies and over 40 best practices for applying them with substantial cost savings. Most importantly, this framework has been intensively researched, vetted, and refined over five years with hundreds of housing industry executives. The goal is not to dogmatically impose one solution for all, but to engage housing professionals to high-performance as a journey and how to get on their own path. 

During this session, we’ll review potential updates to program specs that would deliver meaningful, cost-effective improvements in energy efficiency, building performance, and resilience. Join us for a look at the exciting future for housing. It keeps getting better.

Zer0 Place is a net-zero, mixed-use development with 46 residential units, including affordable and accessible units, as well as retail space. Designed to provide a community of “zero energy living,” this NY State Building of Excellence award winner is intended to meet LEED, DOE Zero Energy Ready Home, EPA Indoor airPlus, and Energy Star requirements and will deliver zero energy bills for residents.

High performance zero energy homes provide many benefits including cost savings, energy resiliency, durability, comfort, and sustainable operation. While these types of homes have been built for a long time, the knowledge of how to build them has historically been kept by few. Now with increasingly stringent building codes across the U.S., driven by long-term energy policy and growing demands on the energy grid, all builders and implementers need to know how to build high performance.