Title
Growing a Community of Practice to Support Ambitious Building Performance Standards: How Building Resource Hubs Can Drive the Transformation of Our Built Environment
Co-authors
Richard Yancey, Building Energy Exchange
Hailey Moll, Building Energy Exchange
Casius Pealer, Institute for Market Transformation
Adam Hinge, Sustainable Energy Partnerships
Abstract
Buildings are at the center of the world’s most urgent societal issues, including climate change, affordability, resiliency, and public health. Over the past decade, U.S. state and local governments have adopted revolutionary policies to dramatically improve building performance based on measured energy and emissions to mitigate public and environmental impacts. However, implementing this kind of bold policy requires a fundamental change to the ways we build, finance, and operate our buildings.
Cities and regions can overcome these challenges by creating local knowledge exchange “hubs” that mobilize businesses and residents in support of public policy goals and rapidly scale competitive markets for high-performance buildings. These hubs can also promote equitable outcomes by partnering with community organizations on program direction, particularly related to support for workforce development and protection of affordable housing. Most importantly, hubs can act as a neutral, trusted entity that can facilitate relationships and collaboration between the disparate parties involved in commercial real estate, the local government, utilities, residents, and community groups.
In this paper, Building Energy Exchange (BE-Ex) and the Institute for Market Transformation (IMT) propose a framework for hub development based on experiences deploying and scaling hubs in a variety of U.S. markets, identifying process elements and assets critical to the success of a new hub within its local context. This framework promises to support and accelerate the development of local hubs that can benefit from tested best practices in policy implementation and market engagement, enabling them to conserve limited resources without
sacrificing programmatic excellence.
