The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Building Energy Codes Program (BECP) periodically evaluates national and state-level impacts associated with energy codes in residential and commercial buildings. Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), funded by DOE, conducted an assessment of the prospective impacts of national model building energy codes from 2010 through 2040. A previous PNNL study evaluated the impact of the Building Energy Codes Program; this study looked more broadly at overall code impacts.

Developed as a common EU framework of core indicators for the sustainability of office and residential buildings, Level(s) provides a set of indicators and common metrics for measuring the environmental performance of buildings along their life cycle. As well as environmental performance, which is the main focus, it also enables other important related aspects of the performance of buildings to be assessed using indicators for health and comfort, life cycle cost and potential future risks to performance.

The ABRACADABRA project is developing a toolkit, targeting policy makers, with a focus on regulatory challenges and opportunities for boosting energy retrofitting of buildings. For this purpose, the project will investigate regulatory issues, as well as available good practices, in the project’s target countries (Bulgaria, Greece, Italy, Latvia, Norway, Romania, Spain, and the Netherlands).

This document is the companion to parts 1 and 2 of the guidance on how to use Level(s). In part 1 a general introduction to Level(s) is provided, together with in Part 2 an overview of the macro-objectives, performance indicators and the three Levels of performance assessment (Level(s) - Part 1 and 2). The three Levels are:

Retrofitting has been proposed as a method to significantly reduce energy consumption and emission derived from the housing sector. Having said this it remains clear that severe restraints remain; and the concept of a “one solution fits all” is at the very least unrealistic. As it has been repeatedly supported via the Abracadabra project any potential solution must deal with significantly complex issues at technical, legislative and regulatory levels, and of course at financial and economic levels.

Cities are increasingly taking actions such as building code enforcement, urban planning, and public transit expansion to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide in their communities and municipal operations. However, many cities lack the quantitative information needed to estimate policy impacts and prioritize city actions in terms of carbon abatement potential and cost effectiveness. This report fills this research gap by providing methodologies to assess the carbon abatement potential of a variety of city actions.

In a prior study entitled “Mapping of Existing Energy Efficiency Standards and Technologies in Buildings in the UNECE Region”, the UN Committee on Housing and Land Management (CHLM) and the Committee on Sustainable Energy (CSE) commissioned a comparative study on building standards in the UNECE region. The current report follows up on this by analyzing the actual prevalence of specific types of energy-efficient technologies in the buildings sector in the UNECE region, along with the levels and types of public policy interventions supporting their implementations.

This report is the Interim Technical Report for the Building Code Energy Performance Trajectory Project. It accompanies the Interim Synthesis Report for the Building Code Energy Performance Trajectory Project, entitled The Bottom Line – the household impacts of delaying improved energy requirements in the Building Code and which was published on the 8th of February 2018, providing more detail on the assumptions behind and the preliminary results from the underlying modelling work.

The report provides the following key items:

In 2017, New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA) developed its 2016 Stretch Code Supplement to the 2016 New York State Energy Conservation Construction Code. Since 2017, NYSERDA has continued to develop the 2018 edition, as part of the efforts to achieve a statewide Net Zero Energy Code by 2028.

This report is a product of the collaborative research project ‘Validating and Improving the BASIX Assessment Tool for Low-Carbon Dwellings’. Initiated by the Cooperative Research Centre for Low Carbon Living, the University of New South Wales (UNSW) and the New South Wales Government, this project addresses the policy need for post-occupancy evaluation of the BASIX tool by measuring the actual energy consumption of BASIX-compliant dwellings.