Energy Where We Live and Work

“Because many buildings stand for at least 50–100 years—and some last for centuries—it is essential to get them right the first time.”

In the U.S. buildings consume approximately 39% of primary energy, including 70% of electricity, and are responsible for approximately 38% of U.S. carbon dioxide emissions. Using HVAC to maintain acceptable indoor environmental quality (IEQ) consumes 37% of the energy used in buildings. -ASHRAE Journal, June 2009.

Worldwide, people use about a third of all energy in buildings—for heating, cooling, cooking, lighting, and running appliances. Building-related energy demand is rising rapidly, particularly within our homes. But there are large differences in household energy use from one country to the next: for example, people in the United States and Canada consume 2.4 times as much energy at home as those in Western Europe.

Although perhaps one fourth of the world’s inhabitants have inadequate shelter or no house at all, for many other people home sizes are expanding even as the number of people per household shrinks. The United States represents the extreme case, where average new homes grew nearly 38 percent between 1975 and 2000, to 2,265 square feet—twice the size of typical homes in Europe or Japan and 26 times the living space of the average person in Africa.

As homes become bigger, each individual house has more space to heat, cool, and light, as well as room for bigger and more appliances. Home appliances are the world’s fastest-growing energy consumers after automobiles, accounting for 30 percent of industrial countries’ electricity consumption and 12 percent of their greenhouse gas emissions. Yet the same needs could be met with far less energy. Technologies available today could advance appliance efficiency by at least an additional 33 percent over the next decade, and further improvements in dryers, televisions, lighting, and standby power consumption could avoid more than half of projected consumption growth in the industrial world by 2030. These building practices and technologies just need to be integrated into the way we build and live life. There is a definite need to consume less and it can be done while saving money and keeping our same standard of living.

There is a surprising answer to many energy issues that America and the world are facing right now. It is remarkably cleaner than coal and fossil fuel, it does not involve foreign countries and decreases dependency on outside resources, and reduces costs. This energy source is currently available and easily accessible right now; it is known as energy efficiency. Energy efficiency isn't energy conservation, or going without. Energy efficiency is wasting less energy, or consuming less energy while performing the same tasks. This can be done through various building practices, such as using the goals of ecological design and implementing those goals through better building products and systems. As the charts above demonstrate there is a need to decrease our energy usage in our homes (namely in heating and cooling) and take our dependency away from petroleum, natural gas and coal by increasing our use of renewable energy.