In an era of U.S. energy abundance, the persistently high energy bills paid by low-income households is troubling. After decades of weatherization and bill-payment programs, low-income households still spend a higher percent of their income on electricity and gas bills than any other income group. Their energy burden is not declining, and it remains persistently high in particular geographies such as the South, rural America, and minority communities.

Naturally ventilated buildings have been worldwide increasingly welcomed, given the current global awareness toward environmental sustainability, indoor health-quality and renewable energy. As Natural Ventilation (NV) performance relies on building design and interaction with the local environment, its potential benefits are not always easy to take advantage of, and thus sets up a vital field of study. This paper provides an overview of investigations on the subject by collecting researches focused on thermal comfort, energy efficiency and indoor air quality.

This report is the first report of the ‘Energy Savings 2030’-project which seeks to help the Coalition for Energy Savings to produce a robust and timely input to the 2030 policy discussion. It brings together and summarises recent empirical evidence on costs and benefits of energy efficiency measures. The evidence gap in terms of reliable ex-post data is well known. In the majority of cases results from ex-ante modelling studies inform the debate. The research carried out for this report confirms the persistent gap in publicly available ex-post evaluations of energy efficiency programmes.