The US Dept. of Energy (DOE) recently released its 2024 Progress Report for the Better Buildings initiative—an annual publication that highlights the achievements of the initiative and its partners by sector. The Better Buildings initiative (BB) aims to improve energy efficiency and advance decarbonization across the nation’s various building sectors. BB helps organizations reduce their energy use, lower operational costs, and improve sustainability. It accomplishes this by bringing together thought leaders and organizations across the country committed to sharing research, insights, and best practices to encourage innovation and support the transition to a low-carbon economy.
One of the sectors highlighted in the report is multifamily housing. Multifamily housing consists of 650 million square feet of dwellings in the US and creates 108 million metric tons of CO2e emissions yearly. However, the department of Housing and Urban Development’s latest energy efficiency standards, championed by BB, are “estimated to save $5,800 per unit over their life cycle.” These savings reflect a significant reduction of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. The BB Progress Report says that reducing GHG emissions in multifamily housing is “critical” in achieving a low-carbon economy. While heat pump technology and electrification remain key to achieving these goals, BB cites “outdated misconceptions” about heat pump effectiveness as a key barrier to widespread adoption, as the first heat pumps used in the US in the 70s were commonly improperly installed due to lack of workforce experience and not as efficient as today’s heat pump. Financing decarbonization in multifamily housing is also complex with many owners, businesses, and even traditional financiers being ill-equipped to navigate financing these projects. Despite all these hurdles, BB partners continue to pioneer innovations and impactful multifamily housing projects. The multifamily sector spotlight in the report includes a “Leadership in Action” section, highlighting many organizations spearheading the development of green energy multifamily projects, proving that multifamily housing is not impossible to serve, but instead requires innovative thinking and collaboration to service.
ICAST is a Better Buildings initiative ally that serves the multifamily affordable housing sector and takes a proactive approach to advancing energy efficiency by creating scalable models for energy retrofits. We administer award-winning programs nationwide, such as WattSmart, that advance the Better Buildings mission and create simple pathways to deeply impactful energy efficiency retrofits. To overcome the multifaceted barriers cited by BB, we partner with Triple Bottom Line Foundation and Finance for Impact, two nonprofits that focus on financing multifamily housing green energy projects. These nonprofits offer innovative green financing products that make multifamily green energy retrofits possible in ways that traditional debt financing cannot sustain. While financing is key to getting individual projects off the ground, many energy efficiency technologies like heat pumps require education to change public consensus: ICAST offers educational materials on often-misunderstood very-high efficiency technologies and spearheads educational efforts wherever we administer programs, enabling multifamily stakeholders to make better-informed decisions when it comes to green energy retrofits for multifamily properties.