A national report from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory: The Cost of Decarbonization and Energy Upgrade Retrofits for US Homes

Cost is a major barrier when upgrading homes to reduce carbon emissions required to meet DOE’s climate-related goals. This report summarizes a nationwide effort to gather home energy upgrade project cost data along with household energy performance data. The goal was to develop cost benchmarks and to guide future R&D efforts aimed at cost compression and scaling of the residential upgrade market.

The report features 35 ZEN homes and points to the ZEN approach as costing about half as much while saving twice as much carbon compared to other alternative approaches.