EEBA Academy

In this presentation, we’ll show how affordable home builders like United Way of Long Island, along with production, custom, and multifamily builders across the country, are building healthy, durable, energy-efficient homes that are achieving remarkably high performance and low Home Energy Rating System scores – with a program average of HERS 43 without PV and HERS 6 with PV.

Once homebuyers purchase new homes often based on infatuation with community and design, bad home performance experiences can negate all the hard work earning customer satisfaction. It is critical to get high-performance right. This course begins that process with lessons-learned from decades of experience as a residential architect and work with thousands of home builders while serving as national director for ENERGY STAR Certified Home and Zero Energy Ready Home. The resulting framework for high performance homes includes five key strategies and over 40 best practices for applying them with substantial cost savings. Most importantly, this framework has been intensively researched, vetted, and refined over five years with hundreds of housing industry executives. The goal is not to dogmatically impose one solution for all, but to engage housing professionals to high-performance as a journey and how to get on their own path. 

High performance zero energy homes provide many benefits including cost savings, energy resiliency, durability, comfort, and sustainable operation. While these types of homes have been built for a long time, the knowledge of how to build them has historically been kept by few. Now with increasingly stringent building codes across the U.S., driven by long-term energy policy and growing demands on the energy grid, all builders and implementers need to know how to build high performance. 

This panel will introduce the EEBA / ProBuilder Ultimate ZEN All Electric Home and discuss its key features, the hurdles encountered, and key points of buyer acceptance. This will lead into a discussion on what is next in high performance building, ways to get there, and an example of one unique builder and energy rater partnership designed to take on the question of "What's next and how do we get there?"