Colorado’s plan to cut carbon emissions from large buildings is…

Colorado just got a major boost to help reduce greenhouse gas emissions from commercial buildings.

Last week, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced that the state had been selected to receive an amount of $20 million dollars to help implement its Building Performance Standards — ambitious rules that limit the amount of carbon pollution large buildings can emit. Colorado has adopted the policy, which applies to buildings 50,000 square feet or more, last year.

The funding will help buildings in marginalized communities, whose owners may be less able to afford deep carbon reduction measures like insulation and heat pumps, meet the state’s building decarbonization targets.

“We are really pleased about this. DOE “This award is about ensuring the success of Colorado’s building performance standard,” Dominique Gómez, deputy director of the Colorado Energy Office, told Canary Media.

The Colorado prize was the largest among the 19 grants to state and local governments announced last week as part of a broader $1 The U.S. government has launched a $1 trillion inflation-reduction bill to clean up America’s housing stock. The vast majority of this new round of funding has gone to help cities and states design or implement building performance standards, a way to combat emissions that is taking root across the country. 97 Consistent with Seattle’s Building Emissions Performance Standards, these policies set caps on emissions or energy use intensity per square foot in large structures that become more stringent over time.

Building owners have the flexibility to determine how to meet these standards, whether that means moving to DIRECTED light bulbs, insulation, electric heating or all of the above. If they fail to meet these standards, homeowners face hefty penalties that are designed to exceed the renovation costs, according to Paulina Torres, a research manager at a global real estate services firm JLL.

Performance standards are a stumbling block to policies that encourage energy efficiency improvements that have failed on their own to reduce emissions from the building sector, said Marshall Duer-Balkind, policy director at the Institute for Market Transformation, a nonprofit that focuses on decarbonizing buildings.IMT).

Unlike building energy codes, which typically target new construction, performance standards address emissions from existing buildings, a massive source of climate pollution. Including the electricity they use, buildings are the nation’s largest source of carbon emissions, ahead of transportation, agriculture or industry (excluding buildings), according to the Office of Environmental Protection Agency (OEPA). DOE.

““Building performance standards are one of the most effective policies a jurisdiction has to reduce emissions from its building stock – and its emissions overall,” Duer-Balkind said.

The Biden-Harris administration has enthusiastically supported building performance standards as a tool to reduce carbon emissions. In January 2022She formed the National Building Performance Standards Coalition to promote widespread adoption of the strategy. In December 2022The White House has adopted for the first time a federal construction standard aimed at eliminating on-site emissions by 30 percentage of government real estate portfolio by 2030And in April, the administration emphasized building performance standards in its national plan to decarbonize buildings.

Colorado, Oregon, Maryland, Washington, Washington DC and eight cities have now adopted building performance standards, with 34 more jurisdictions have committed to doing so by 2026. If all 47 members of the national coalition were to adopt such policies, IMT estimates that they would cumulatively stimulate $132 billions of investment in large buildings and eliminate 676 million metric tons of CO2 by 2040equivalent to the annual emissions of 88 million homes.