Policy & Programs
Federal and State Policy
Policy Principles
The Building Performance Association, with over two decades of leadership in residential energy efficiency and home performance, supports policies that will enhance the expansion of home performance and energy efficiency businesses and industries that employ more than 2.25 million Americans across all 50 states. Energy efficiency is the quickest, cleanest and least expensive way to reduce energy consumption while creating local jobs and providing health and comfort benefits to consumers. The Association has twelve policy principles that guide our work. We support:
- Robust Federal and state funding for energy efficiency, weatherization, and home performance.
- Incentives, such as rebates and tax incentives, to increase market penetration of comprehensive home performance and energy efficiency upgrades that incorporate building science principles.
- The expansion of well-designed financing options to support customer uptake of home performance and energy efficiency upgrades.
- Utilizing smart technologies to enable data collection and information-sharing between homeowners, utilities, partners, and service providers that advance building energy performance.
- Consistent and reliable data access to improve the quantification of energy savings and non-energy benefits from energy efficiency projects.
- Awareness and quantification of the building performance workforce as a distinct and critical industry. We support the development and funding of training, education, and career paths that enable the stabilization and expansion of the building performance workforce, inclusive of all trades that are part of comprehensive home performance and energy efficiency upgrades.
- Collaboration between the weatherization and home performance industries to promote training and standards that enable the success and expansion of high-quality residential retrofits in both low-income and market-rate buildings.
- Standardized reporting for home performance programs to encourage comparability across programs, reduce program administrative costs, and decrease the data collection burden on contractors.
- Standardized data transfer to enable interoperability between stakeholders in the energy efficiency industry and other information trading partners, such as the real estate and financing industries, to scale up adoption of home energy upgrades
- States using cost-effectiveness screening practices that align with state policy and account for the full benefits and costs of building performance and energy efficiency improvements.
- Policies and research to advance healthy homes, such as policies that address barriers to comprehensive energy upgrades and support growth of new funding sources.
- Policies and research that demonstrate the benefits of residential energy efficiency and weatherization in addressing broader goals, such as resilient infrastructure, a clean power grid, improved health outcomes, and climate change mitigation.
Our most recent advancement in the federal policy realm was testifying in support of H.R. 1315, “The Blue Collar to Green Collar Jobs Act of 2019” before the U.S. House of Representatives House Committee on Energy and Commerce. The legislation aims to support training for employment in clean energy industries including residential energy efficiency and renewable energy retrofits. The hearing was held on February 27, 2019, and titled “Clean Energy Infrastructure and the Workforce to Build It.”
Leticia Colon de Mejias, Building Performance Association’s Policy Co-Chair and CEO of contracting firm Energy Efficiencies Solutions in Windsor, Connecticut, included in her testimony, “Jobs in the energy efficiency and clean energy industries exist, and we need qualified workers to fill them”. Read her full testimony here.
State Issues
Our state-level policy work dovetails with our goals to develop regional and/or state chapters. We want to hear from you about the important policy issues that are impacting the growth of residential and commercial energy efficiency investments in your state. Additionally, if you are interested in establishing a chapter in your home state, please contact Joe Cullen, Director of Policy and State Outreach at jcullen@building-performance.org.
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