We’re at the National Residential Energy Network (RESNET) annual conference in Orlando, Florida this week. During the opening session RESNET’s director outlined a few very impressive achievements from the past year and also announced some extremely exciting developments moving forward.
Although the new homes and retrofit market continues to struggle, RESNET reports yet another year of growth. 120,000 homes were “officially” evaluated by HERS raters in 2010 – a 7% increase from 2009. Believe it or not, this number represents 41% of all new homes built in 2010!
The 120,00 evaluations mentioned by RESNET’s director represent primarily, if not exclusively, audits on new home projects. When existing home energy audits are included, the total number of homes tested and inspected by energy raters would likely be 3 or 4 times higher than the reported number of ratings. That’s a lot of energy audits!
Several new partnerships were formed with industry leading contractors associations in 2010. Representatives from two new partner organizations, ACCA and NAIMA, spoke at the opening session.
What’s even more exciting is that RESNET’s leadership board recently received commitments from “mega” home builders such as KB Homes, Cyntex, Dell Webb, and Pulte Homes to have all of their homes rated and to market the ratings on their homes to consumers. Production builders such as these are responsible for a significant % of the total numbers built in the U.S. every year. The work that this will produce for raters is attractive, but the potential for these commitments to catalyze a transition to every new home requiring a HERS rating is ground breaking.
RESNET’s members, Home Energy Raters, provide testing and inspections for most of the nation’s green home certification programs (think ENERGY STAR). They also perform hundreds of thousands of existing-home energy audits every year.