Study: Green building codes
don’t save energy
Green Building Advisor
Scott Gibson
15 January 2015
Building codes that require energy efficient features haven't done
anything to lower energy consumption in California despite adding
thousands of dollars to the purchase price of a new house, according to
a new report.
In a paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, Arik
Levinson said that energy codes enacted in California in 1978 were
supposed to reduce energy consumption by 80 percent.
But homes built since then actually don't use less energy, even though
the codes have added thousands of dollars to the cost of construction.
The full text of Levinson's paper is behind a pay wall, but it was
summarized by the Washington Examiner.
Levinson, an economics professor at Georgetown University, weighed a
variety of factors in analyzing energy use, the Examiner said, to avoid
skewing the results.
"Levinson did not only correct for issues that would bias results
toward showing how ineffective green energy codes are," the newspaper
said. "Recently built homes actually use more electricity than homes
built prior to the 1978 building codes, but these homes are larger,
built in warmer climates and have more residents than the pre-1978
homes."
He concluded there's "no evidence that homes constructed since
California instituted its building energy codes use less electricity
today than homes built before the codes came into effect."
Is this the
Jevons Paradox?
More efficiency but more consumption? It turns out that's not a new
idea.
GBA senior editor Martin Holladay wrote about this topic back in 2009,
in a blog titled The Jevons Paradox. The phenomenon was originally
described in The Coal Question, a book published in 1865 by an
economist named William Stanley Jevons.
"It is wholly a confusion of ideas to suppose that the economical use
of fuel is equivalent to a diminished consumption," Jevons wrote. "The
very contrary is the truth."
Holladay wrote that the Jevons Paradox is evident in any number of
ways: more efficient refrigerators leading to bigger refrigerators,
better fuel economy prompting drivers to drive more miles, better
windows and insulation techniques pushing homeowners to build bigger
houses.
Evidence of the Jevons Paradox at work can be found in data collected
by the U.S. Energy Information Administration. The agency reported last
year that newer homes in the U.S. are nearly one-third bigger than they
used to be while using 2 percent more total energy -- a confirmation of
sorts that increased efficiencies can lead not to lower consumption but
to bigger dwellings.
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