These proposed cuts would imperil BTO’s ability to deliver energy and cost saving technologies. Programs and technologies that save energy and improve efficiency are especially beneficial with rising energy costs due to the AI boom and rush to build energy-intensive data centers, the Iran war, and worsening extreme temperature and weather events. Without continued advancement and adoption of energy saving technologies, energy will become less affordable for American households and businesses. 

Driving Safer, More Affordable, Reliable, and Efficient Buildings by Supporting R&D, Analysis, and Building Energy Upgrades

These cuts would dramatically reduce R&D funding and access to free tools and resources that turn lab results into concrete guidance for building owners and efficiency program managers. Some examples of BTO’s many programs and how they would be negatively impacted by the proposed budget cuts are discussed below. 

R&D Grants Support Cutting-Edge Building Technologies and Innovative Construction Practices to Reduce Costs and Energy Use

BTO grants funds to research laboratories, universities, manufacturers, and start-ups to conduct cutting-edge research on new, promising technologies that can reduce building energy use and costs. BTO’s grant programs typically offer awards ranging in size from $500,000 to $5,000,000 to support well-designed, multiyear lab and field-based research. The proposed budget of only $20 million for all of BTO would make executing any of these programs extremely difficult.

BENEFIT Competitive R&D Funding. For more than a decade, BTO has offered R&D grant funds through an annual funding opportunity called Building Energy Efficiency Frontiers & Innovation Technologies (BENEFIT). Since 2014, BTO has awarded an estimated $400-450 million to support building energy technology innovations. Example research areas have included:

• New refrigerants to use in Heating, Ventilation, Air Conditioning, and Refrigeration (HVAC/R) equipment that offer low global warming potential (GWP) and minimize hazards that can arise from refrigerant leaks.

• Color-tuning LEDs that can optimize lighting for various building needs and scenarios, including through increasing building occupant satisfaction and reducing lighting energy use by upwards of 90%.

• Innovative materials and methods for installing insulation and air sealing existing buildings to improve energy performance and drastically reduce installation costs.  

• Impact: Cutting this work may increase manufacturer uncertainty for timelines and performances of new technologies, potentially exacerbating future supply chain issues, delays, and costs for in-demand, high-performing equipment and appliances. 

Advanced Building Construction. A newer grant funding space for BTO has focused on advancing building construction practices around offsite and modularized construction. These practices could significantly advance more affordable housing BTO has focused a subset of R&D grants on supporting innovative construction practices and enhancing end-product energy efficiency through its Advanced Building Construction (ABC) program. 

• Impact: Without dedicated funding, the U.S. could continue to lag behind other countries on advanced housing construction practices and face even greater challenges combatting rising housing costs. 

Technical Assistance for Building Energy Codes. Energy codes that support reduced energy loads, increased resilience, better indoor air quality, and improved thermal comfort are proven strategies for producing real cost savings. Many jurisdictions that oversee building codes, especially smaller, rural, or lower resourced regions, benefit from financial support to conduct analyses, train construction teams, and adopt digitized data systems that make achieving these codes easier for everyone.

• Impact: The proposed budget cuts stand to remove much of this support, leaving more building departments around the country with hard-to-answer questions and inspection delays.

Supporting Free Analysis Tools and Resources to Help Building Owners Make Smart Investments Decisions that Benefit Buildings and Communities

More than half of the country’s 110 million existing buildings are more than 50 years old and exist across a wide variety of climates. Building owners, occupants, and residents want to improve existing building stock to reduce costs, improve air quality, better serve building functions, and enhance comfort. But the right answer for any subset of buildings can vary dramatically. For more than 20 years, BTO has supported development of free, publicly available data analysis tools and resources that help users make more informed decisions and plans with more accurate projections. Example tools include:

EnergyPlus. An open-source, physics-based building energy modeling software that is used by thousands of vendors and products to assess building energy use for a wide variety of purposes. EnergyPlus systems are used by national labs on supercomputers to create digital twins of U.S. buildings, by most major commercial building engineering firms and manufacturers, and in various tools - making it one of the most widely used engines for building energy modeling in the world.

• Impact: Funding losses to this effort carries risks of ripple effects into the private sector across new building construction and equipment manufacturing.

ResStock & ComStock. Housed at the National Lab of the Rockies (formerly known as the National Renewable Energy Laboratory), these highly representative datasets include about 700,000 simulated buildings based on statistical sampling of real data of U.S. buildings. These resources are used by policymakers, program managers, and industry to conduct energy planning and assess cost-effectiveness of various energy upgrades in representative building types, including through assessing hourly load shapes for time-sensitive analysis.

• Impact: Loss of support for these resources could prevent decision-makers nationwide from having access to the most up-to-date and detailed data available about how building components impact massive-scale energy load patterns. 

Reduced funding support for this work will leave more building owners and policy makers with unanswered questions about which investments will most benefit their buildings and communities. These freely available tools provide a common benefit to the entire building energy industry, and are not likely to be replicated for as broad use by the private sector.     

Providing Technical Assistance and Workforce Training to Advance Energy- and Cost-Saving Technologies

Beyond technology research, commercializing and deploying new technologies in real buildings requires technical support, accurate information about best practices and potential risks, training for installation and operations workers, and evaluation of energy impacts. Many homeowners, building owners, developers, and public officials have limited time and resources to learn about what new technologies are available and whether they could be a good fit for their needs. BTO programs directly support businesses, states, and local governments to aid in their assessment and deployment of energy saving programs. Examples include:

Better Buildings. A recognition and assistance program that has coached hundreds of major corporations, small businesses, and local governments in achieving targeted, time-bound goals to measurably reduce their energy use. Better Buildings offers public recognition to partners that meet and exceed their goals - providing a valuable incentive to turn ideas into action and a pathway for real customers to use and adopt emerging advanced technologies. Better Buildings sub-programs include accelerators that assist industry partners with technology adoption, an energy upgrade financing navigator, and the Home Energy Score program, which provides standardized energy information to American households, much like a miles-per-gallon rating or nutrition facts label, to help homeowners make informed investment decisions. Since inception, Better Buildings partners have saved $24 billion in energy bills, 25 billion gallons of water, and finance $41 billion in energy upgrades.

• Impact: The proposed funding cuts to these efforts could increase the likelihood that federal breakthroughs in advanced energy and cost saving technologies take longer to actually benefit Americans.

Building America. Supports home builders and contractors with ready-to-use case studies, guidance information, tools, and educational content on how to deliver high-performance housing. Free resources on the Building America website can walk any housing developer, builder, contractor, or worker through science-based practices that deliver durable, healthy, efficient, and resilient housing.

• Impact: As new technologies are developed and commercialized, continued funding for this work helps get new results out to real practitioners that deliver benefits to American households. 

Energy Skilled. The only way to materialize energy-saving benefits from modern technologies is through a skilled workforce that understands how to properly select, install, and maintain them. Training programs and certifications can become recognized through Energy Skilled if they educate participants to obtain specific skills aligned with the latest research and available technologies. Programs that do not yet achieve Energy Skilled standards can use free training modules available online to augment their content and achieve recognition. So far, more than 80 training/certification providers have achieved Energy Skilled recognition for their HVAC, water heating, and/or building energy assessment programs.

• Impact: Reduced funding could limit growth of this program that helps get more workers up to speed on how to deploy energy- and cost-saving technologies.

Solar Decathlon. The Solar Decathlon program - now called BuildingNEXT - engages students at a variety of universities around the world in the mechanics of building highly efficient, solar-powered housing. These programs help inspire student engineers, architects, and construction managers about the promises of energy efficient construction and engage them in real-world application and problem solving. Solar Decathlon has significantly expanded to enable more varied avenues for participation, dramatically increasing the reach of the program to thousands more students.

• Impact: Reduced funding for this program and programs like it decreases the visibility of cutting-edge technologies that can be vital to recruiting the next generation of problem-solvers to the industry.   

Increasing Adoption by Supporting Economies of Scale 

A variety of BTO programs support getting the best building energy technologies available to consumers and deployed through economies of scale. In many cases, after cost reductions have been achieved through material selection and supply chain efficiencies, the best way to reduce costs to consumers is through achieving economies of scale that spread fixed costs over more production and sales, increase certainty, and optimize delivery processes.

Removing BTO’s budget to support achieving economies of scale for energy- and cost-saving technologies would delay technology scale up and the associated benefits of wide scale market adoption. Example programs include:

High-Performance Building Certifications. Building certification programs help to ensure quality delivery of efficient technologies and help buyers and tenants recognize the value these buildings provide. BTO oversees the Energy Efficient Homes program (formerly Zero Energy Ready Homes program) and recently gained administration of the Energy Star Certification program from the Environmental Protection Agency. By establishing voluntary standards that leading-edge builders can tap into, these programs help showcase the value of high-performance buildings and accelerate energy efficient technology adoption.

• Impact: Reduced funding to these efforts could limit technology adoption by making the value of energy efficiency less apparent to homebuyers and renters.

Building Energy Codes. BTO supports rigorous analysis that helps independent building energy code organizations evaluate the costs and benefits of including various technologies into building energy codes. The codes program also monitors the impact of code adoption across jurisdictions and evaluates impacts of energy codes on energy use and building construction practices.

• Impact: Reduced funding for this program could increase the inconsistency in building energy codes adopted across the U.S. and limit comparable information across these programs, potentially reducing ease for builders to establish construction practices that reliably meet codes across jurisdictions.

Appliance Standards. As authorized by Congress, BTO’s Appliance Standards program allows DOE to set cost-effective minimum energy efficiency requirements for various residential, commercial, and industrial appliances and equipment. This program is a consumer protection program that helps increase the quality of available technologies in the marketplace and to decrease operational costs. The standards are credited with massive energy use and cost savings totalling over $100 billion per year - equivalent to $570 in savings per household. Importantly, the program still enables vast consumer choice across technology types by just removing low energy performance as an area for competition. DOE recently proposed a new rule governing the process for updating appliance standards - read more about this rule and its impacts here.

• Impact: A limited budget for BTO could significantly reduce the capacity of the program to undertake the technical analyses necessary to evaluate technology improvements and updated efficiency standards, and ultimately delay energy and cost savings for consumers.

BTO’s Delivery of Energy and Cost Savings at Risk

When homes and buildings are working well, they hum quietly in the background, meeting our needs for heating, cooling, lighting, refrigeration, and electronics. BTO’s work has helped these functions happen more efficiently and more affordably. Many of the technologies BTO has helped invent and improve are remarkably ordinary to most people: lightbulbs, windows, insulation, heat pumps, and clothes dryers. Even these everyday technologies require innovations to minimize strain on the grid and energy resources while optimizing overall performance. 

BTO’s years focusing on technologies doesn’t always receive fanfare, but it does deliver results. Small energy and cost savings achieved in any one of these technologies rapidly grow when these technologies are used in millions of buildings across the country. 

BTO’s work has consistently paid for itself many times over in dollars saved by real households and businesses across the country. All of the office’s diverse programs depend on sustained funding and staff expertise that cannot be quickly rebuilt once lost. 

With rising energy costs are rising from data center demand, geopolitical instability, and extreme weather. Energy efficiency has been one of the few consistently effective tools for insulating American families and businesses from those pressures. Cutting this work doesn’t reduce government spending so much as its shifts costs onto energy bills for years to come. 

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This piece was drafted by trusted and vetted alumni of the U.S. Department of Energy. Any views and opinions expressed are that of the author(s) and do not reflect those of the DOE Alumni Network.