The City of Austin, Texas Green Builder Program

by The Results Center, IRT Environment, Inc. Paperback, 28 pages, $75.

One recent report in IRT Environment’s series of profiles of utility demand-side management (DSM) programs covers the City of Austin’s Green Builder Program. This report is useful in several ways: it provides an excellent descriptive overview of the program and how it functions; it analyzes the program using standard evaluation criteria for energy management and conservation programs (from which the Green Builder program evolved); and it discusses in some detail the strengths, weaknesses, and lessons learned by the program, including a detailed discussion about its transferability to other locales.

The Profile applauds the program’s voluntary, market-driven approach and its simplified, menu-driven structure for assigning rating to homes ranging from one to four stars. Interestingly, no homes have yet been awarded the highest, four-star rating, reflecting the high goals program staff set for this recognition.

The authors of this profile are clearly sympathetic to the goals of the Green Builder program, and they do an excellent job of describing its many societal and economic benefits, including those that fall outside the range of traditional DSM analyses and are difficult to quantify. “Given the all-encompassing nature of sustainability, Green Builder’s environmental benefits range from short-term and well-defined to multi-generational and highly ambiguous, complicating the program’s direct justification while reinforcing the merit of such an approach to energy efficiency.” At the same time, they take the program’s management to task for not investing more effort in creating the documentation needed to support such analyses: “This lack of rigorous evaluation and cost/benefit analyses could challenge the program and may prove to be a liability in the future.”

As a specific program benefit relating to energy conservation, the Profile notes that electricity bills in Austin are on average lower than those of nearby San Antonio, in spite of the fact that electric rates in Austin are higher. This accomplishment reflects a primary goal of DSM—saving energy while saving money for consumers. The most significant program achievement is much harder to quantify, however: “The ultimate goal of the program is to shift building practices in Austin towards sustainability. This has clearly occurred as a result of the program.” This well-written and comprehensive profile should be required reading for anyone considering the implementation of a green building program.