Proposed – and very controversial – plans to tighten regulations governing emissions from America’s power plants will not become final until sometime mid-summer, the Environmental Protection Agency announced yesterday.
Your Home Builders Association submitted more than a hundred pages of comments on the proposal in December, and the agency had planned to finalize its regulations by June 15, 2015.
While the sweeping regulations target power plants, they would have repercussions for home builders, who could be targeted with much tighter building code requirements if the draft rule becomes final.
However, as the National Association of Home Builders said in its comments, stricter energy codes would affect only new construction, not the millions of older homes not built to today’s higher standards, and EPA has no authority over building codes in the first place.
In addition, no agency or regulatory body can control how much electrical power a home owner decides to use once the building is occupied.
The Home Builders Association of Greenville are your neighbors and community leaders providing education and support for building industry professionals. We create jobs, encourage homeownership, and promote responsible growth throughout the upstate of South Carolina.
Showing posts with label Energy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Energy. Show all posts
Thursday, January 8, 2015
Friday, July 11, 2014
Renewable Energy in New Homes
A rising number of new homes include renewable energy features, a trend that is apparent in both single-family and multifamily construction. McGraw Hill Construction’s data and analytics team surveyed a set of NAHB single-family and multifamily members in 2013.
According to the findings, 12% of single-family builders reported including solar photovoltaic panels in new home construction in 2013. More popular for single-family construction was geothermal groundsource heat exchange property, used for some projects by 26% of home builders. Wind power is less popular, with only 1% of single-family builders reporting its use.
Multifamily developers were more likely to use these power production features in at least some of their projects. For example, 45% of multifamily developers used solar panels, 42% installed geothermal property in some projects and 13% reported using wind turbines.
That said, the frequency of use of these items was more common on the single-family side of the market, perhaps due to incentives like the section 25D power production tax credit for new and existing homes. More than half of single-family builders who report installing solar panels do so on more than 25% of their projects. And more than 75% of single-family builders who install geothermal property do so on more than 25% of their homes.
In contrast, for multifamily developers who report installing solar panels, more than 75% do so on fewer than 25% of their projects. And nearly all multifamily developers who report using geothermal do so on fewer than 25% of their properties.
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