A miles-per-gallon sticker for your home and office

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Unless we’re confronted with actual discomfort — such as cold drafts coming in through the window frames — saving energy is not always high on our list. We tend to invest in the cosmetic improvements that can help increase visual appeal or resale value of our home or building.

But buildings are responsible for 76 percent of power plant-generated electricity and roughly half of the carbon emissions in the environment. Heating, cooling and lighting costs get passed down to consumers and business owners. So while we may not see energy efficiency as sexy, we ought to be paying attention.

What if it was possible to give ourselves a little push and a financial incentive? Here’s an idea that is attracting a good deal of attention from larger cities, the state and the federal government.

The idea is the Energy Performance Score, or EPS, a kind of miles-per-gallon sticker for your home. Developed by Energy Trust of Oregon in partnership with Earth Advantage Institute, the score is a publicly available number associated with your newly constructed home. While it wouldn’t necessarily be posted in your window, it might well be featured on the multiple listing service (MLS) page for your home. Similarly, commercial buildings may soon feature a Building Energy Quotient (BEQ), a newly developed measurement developed by ASHRAE, the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air Conditioning Engineers.

The EPS offers a carrot approach to boosting the rate of home-energy upgrades. While on one hand it offers property buyers a means to compare energy performance on similar homes — in the same way you compare a Toyota Prius to another sedan via the MPG sticker — the score also offers homeowners a motivation to make energy improvements and most likely add to the resale value of their homes.

Energy rating systems have been around for awhile, but are of limited use because they compare an individual home to a hypothetical index, or that same home built, say, to code. Conducted by trained professionals, the EPS audit provides an estimate of energy consumption and carbon emissions based on many criteria to generate the score for a home. Its ASHRAE BEQ counterpart for commercial buildings measures energy consumption before and after occupancy with “as designed” and “in operation” scores.

Such energy labels are gaining steam. The Oregon and Washington legislatures have ratified task forces to examine making the EPS mandatory for home real estate transactions. The City of Seattle is conducting a pilot audit of 5,000 homes using the EPS in an effort to incent homeowners to make energy upgrades. Illinois, Delaware, Maryland, Massachusetts and Arkansas have all expressed interest in similar EPS pilot programs.

Additionally, the U.S. Department of Energy and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency are creating a voluntary federal home energy labeling standard, due in October. The agencies are closely watching this “born-in-Oregon” initiative with an eye toward incorporating the most successful elements into the national standard. Their interest in EPS also stems from the potential of the system to provide an accurate metric for evaluating the success of retrofits paid for by federal money, such as the recently passed “Cash for Caulkers” program.

However, the EPS and BEQ are not designed to be mandates, but a market mechanism that can create opportunity for the private sector. The financial and insurance industries are eyeing EPS as one of the first tools to help assess the value of a higher performing home or building. Ultimately the aim is to integrate the value of the EPS into a mortgage, retrofit loan, appraisal and homeowner insurance.

Where will these energy labels lead us? Such scoring can lead to a larger change in our energy behavior, especially as real-time energy monitoring devices become available. Homeowners and building owners may seek to “beat” their energy scores in the same way that Prius drivers have taken up “extreme” driving practices to increase their miles per gallon averages.

Sean Penrith is executive director of Earth Advantage Institute, a nonprofit green building resource and certification body.