Monika Griefahn, Brooks Rainwater and Kurt Shickman discuss the obstacles and opportunities of retrofitting old buildings to make them more energy efficient, and the different approaches used in Germany and the United States. Today, buildings account for 70 percent of all U.S. electricity consumption and 40 percent of total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. Yet much of our housing and building stock is old, inefficient, and unnecessarily wasteful. Any strategy to capture the benefits of energy efficiency in our “built environment” must include a program to retrofit our existing stock of residential, commercial and industrial structures. Retrofitting the existing building stock is a rare win-win-win policy: it creates clean energy jobs for our nation’s skilled construction workers and at U.S. manufacturing facilities, it benefits homeowners through comfort and energy efficient improvements to their homes, and it helps the environment through long-term energy efficiency gains. Unfortunately, there are obstacles to recognizing potential efficiency gains. Thoughtful public policy must be implemented in order to incentivize this important endeavor.
Partner:
Goethe-Institut Washington
