High performance energy efficient homes that produce their own clean, renewable energy are being built across the country. With new high-tech building products, advanced construction techniques, and increasingly affordable solar panels, we have the technology to build green on a large scale.

Homes and businesses account for almost half of our energy use—and half of our global warming pollution. And yet we are still designing most of our buildings as if we weren’t facing a growing threat from global warming or experiencing an economic downturn. The potential economic and environmental gains from increasing the energy efficiency of our existing and new buildings are vast.

We can do better—and bring our homes and businesses into the 21st century. We are promoting an investment in energy efficiency upgrades to our existing building infrastructure. This is the most effective, least expensive way to create jobs and reduce our energy consumption. From promoting strong local and state building codes to strong federal energy efficiency requirements for natural gas and electric utilities we are working to rewrite the rules that effect how we build. In doing so the incentives set by Congress, we’re working to rewrite the rules that affect how we build. In doing so, we can move our country forward, past the old, inefficient and wasteful, and put ourselves on track to make all new buildings zero-energy by 2030.

To get to zero, we need to:

• Improve the energy efficiency of our existing buildings by investing in weatherization and retrofits.
  
  
• Ramp up building energy codes—the rules that set the minimum for building efficiency.
  
  
• Make sure we’re enforcing these codes, so that all buildings are wasting as little energy as possible.
  
  
• Improve the energy efficiency of lighting, furnaces, electronic products; such as televisions and computers.
  
  
• Give innovative builders the tools they need to go even further by retrofitting old buildings and developing new ways to save energy.
  
  
• Make it easy for everyone to add solar panels and other renewables to their homes and businesses.
  
  
• Dramatically increase gas and electric utilities energy efficiency programs by requiring utilities to invest in energy conservation programs.