This working paper brings together the findings of the first stage in this study, which focusses on the identification of 'macro-objectives' for the environmental performance of the EU building stock. This stage is intended to provide an initial 'top down' view of what the strategic priorities (the 'macro-objectives') should be for the building sector.

Executive Summary Scope and objectives This report provides the findings from the stakeholder-mapping stage the EnergyFit Homes Initiative phase 1. The objectives of this phase were to develop a map of the relevant stakeholders and to understand their perspectives of the need, scope and implantation of a national home energy efficiency information framework. A secondary objective of this stage was to begin to build consensus and a coalition of support for options to be built on in the next stage. This is the penultimate research stage of Phase 1.

Green Public Procurement (GPP) is an important tool to achieve environmental policy goals relating to climate change, resource use and sustainable consumption and production – especially given the importance of public sector spending on goods and services in Europe.

Energy is a complicated topic, and energy performance can also be challenging to determine. This book is about understanding and shaping energy performance of an entire economic sector, using the residential sector as the example, although not at a detailed level. The historical record of attempts to reduce energy use or carbon emissions of countries and the world is primarily one of failure. Should the response to continued failure be to continue to do more of the same? Insanity is sometimes defined in such a manner.

China has made energy conservation and energy efficiency one of its top priorities as a means of guiding its economic and social development. In the past three decades, while China’s economy increased eighteen‑fold, energy consumption increased only five‑fold. The energy intensity of China’s GDP declined by about seventy percent during the same period. In the face of resource and environmental constraints, China vowed to make energy conservation a foundation of its economic and social development strategy, as well as its energy and climate change strategy.

Policies that promote green growth need to be founded on a good understanding of the determinants of green growth and need to be supported with appropriate indicators to monitor progress. This book is an update of the 2014 edition.

Delivering the quality of growth to which citizens aspire requires concerted action across countries and within ministries invested in green growth – finance, economy, industry, trade and agriculture, among others.

This book uses energy and economic models to assess the potential for further energy-efficient improvements in the transport, building, industry and power sectors of China. The report starts with a modelling assessment of the role of energy efficiency in supporting China to achieve its Intended Nationally Determined Contribution (INDC) of reaching a peak in its greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by around 2030.

Economic development will lead to higher demand for various end-use goods and services in India. Energy-efficient technologies provide a way forward to achieve economic growth at relatively lower costs due to associated multiple benefits such as resource conservation, lower energy consumption, higher productivity and lower emissions intensity per unit of output.

The report undertakes the following analysis to identify High Impact Opportunities (HIOs):

The growing per capita income in India is expected to increase the demand for various energy-consuming products and services among Indian households. Enhancing energy efficiency remains one of the cheapest options to “produce” energy in India, as the efficiency of many energy systems has a large scope for improvement, and as this option plays an important part in enhancing India’s energy security.

State-level building energy codes have been around for over 40 years, but recent empirical research has cast doubt on their effectiveness. A potential virtue of standards-based policies is that they may be less regressive than explicit taxes on energy consumption. However, this conjecture has not been tested empirically in the case of building energy codes.

Designers can use superior building design and energy management strategies to create buildings that produce at least as much energy as they consume. These are called zero energy buildings (ZEBs). ZEBs exist in the United States and Canada now; however building energy codes will have to be continuously improved to achieve widespread ZEBs by 2030, a common goal of many cities and some states.

Buildings that emit no greenhouse gas emissions during their operation are vital to meeting the SDGs and Paris Agreement targets. But in the past, zero carbon buildings have been assumed to be only attainable by technologically advanced or wealthy countries. New WRI research finds there are policy pathways to reach zero carbon buildings regardless of location or development status. The report identifies eight pathways countries can take to reach zero carbon buildings by reducing energy demand and cleaning energy supply.

In 1978, California adopted building codes designed to reduce the energy used for heating, cooling, and water heating in buildings. Using a rich dataset of hourly electricity consumption for 158,112 California houses during 2012-13, this paper estimates that single-family homes built from 1980 through 1982 consumed on average 13% less electricity for cooling than premises constructed between 1975 through 1977. This estimate is similar to projected cooling-energy savings made using engineering models at the time the codes were enacted.