Implementation of the Building America Program Benchmark in the EnergyValueTM Housing Award Program

Joe Wiehagen, Tom Kenney, and Kevin Mo, NAHB Research Center
Ali Jalalzadeh-Azar, National Renewable Energy Laboratory
Matthew Shaeffer, Boston University (student)

Keywords

Abstract

The EnergyValueTM Housing Award (EVHA) program recognizes the achievements of home builders in the design, construction, and marketing of exemplary energy-efficient homes. Many builders have increased the sophistication of their energy efficiency practices by adopting a “systems approach” where all aspects of the home design are valued. The Building America Program (BAP) supports home builders to implement construction features that increase the energy performance of homes, based on climate and builder experience, and often including materials or methods that may be new to the builder. These construction improvements are designed to systematically improve performance to achieve energy savings of at least 30 percent based on goals outlined by the BAP. To this point, no consistent metric has been available to evaluate the relative performance of the EVHA designs, nor to estimate progress toward the BAP energy efficiency goals. Adopting the latest BAP Benchmark as a metric to achieve these objectives, the EVHA program can now provide a consistent reference for comparison of the source energy savings of various residential building designs. This paper presents the first benchmark analysis of the 161 2005 gold and silver EVHA winners and provides energy performance estimates within different climate zones as well as a comparison with the current 2005 BAP energy efficiency goals. This analysis illustrates the progress to improve the efficiency of mainstream housing leading to net-Zero Energy Homes.