Building Performance Association Policy Principles

The Building Performance Association, with over two decades of leadership in residential energy efficiency and home performance, supports policies that will enhance the expansion of building performance and energy efficiency businesses and industries that employ more than 2.32 million Americans across all 50 states. Energy efficiency grounded in building science is the quickest, cleanest and least expensive way to reduce energy consumption while creating local jobs and providing health and comfort benefits to consumers. To advance building performance and energy efficiency:

1. We support recognition of the building performance workforce as a distinct and critical industry, to better quantify our collective impact and increase our industry’s ability to access funding from federal and state agencies.
2. We support the development and effective funding of comprehensive workforce development programs (e.g., education, training stipends, apprenticeships, and career paths) that enable the stabilization and expansion of a diverse building performance workforce, inclusive of all trades that are part of comprehensive building performance and energy efficiency upgrades.
3. We support collaboration between the weatherization and building performance industries to promote training and standards that enable the success and expansion of high-quality residential retrofits in both low-income and market-rate buildings.
4. We support robust federal and state funding for energy efficiency, weatherization, and building performance.
5. We support incentives, such as rebates and tax incentives, to increase market penetration of comprehensive building performance and energy efficiency upgrades that incorporate building science principles.
6. We support expansion of well-designed financing options to support customer uptake of building performance and energy efficiency upgrades.
7. We encourage states to use cost-effectiveness screening practices that align with state policy and account for the full benefits and costs of building performance and energy efficiency improvements.
8. We support policies and research to advance healthy homes, such as policies that address barriers to comprehensive energy upgrades and support growth of new funding sources for healthy homes initiatives that engage skilled home performance contractors.
9. In states with clean electricity grid goals and active electrification efforts, BPA supports coordinating electrification initiatives with deployment of building science-based retrofits and weatherization initiatives.
10. We support utilizing smart technologies to enable data collection and information-sharing between homeowners, utilities, partners, and service providers that advance building energy performance.
11. We support consistent, secure, and reliable access to utility data to enable data-driven energy management strategies and improved quantification of the energy savings and additional benefits from building performance projects.
12. We encourage standardized data transfer and reporting for building performance programs to encourage comparability across programs, reduce administrative costs, and enable interoperability between stakeholders in the energy efficiency industry and other information trading partners, such as the real estate and financing industries, in order to scale up adoption of energy upgrades.
13. We support policies and research that demonstrate the benefits of energy efficiency and weatherization in addressing broader goals, such as resilient infrastructure, a clean power grid, improved health outcomes, and climate change mitigation.
14. We support active engagement of state agencies and Governor’s Offices to advance the economic development and job creation potential of energy efficiency businesses and industries, which created or maintained 2.3 million jobs nationwide in 2019.