The point, according to Nate Kredich, vice president of residential market development at the U.S. Green Building Council, is that cutting-edge items can turn into staples more quickly than we might realize. “Custom building is really the research lab for the green builder movement,” he says. “Things that are mainstream today were pushed by the custom builder five, 10, 15 years ago.” Kredich predicts that the cost of buying and installing green building products, particularly energy-related items such as solar panels, will drop by 2020. “I think the whole photovoltaics industry is going to turn on its head between now and the end of the next decade,” he says. “Prices will come down dramatically, and the efficiency of the system will improve as the output goes up.” Existing evidence supports his assertion: A report released last October by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory showed that the average cost of a solar photovoltaic power system in the United States fell by more than 30 percent from 1998 to 2008.
Builders and green experts cite LED lighting as another relatively expensive product expected to continue decreasing in price over the next few years. Like computer chips, LEDs and OLEDs (organic light-emitting diodes) are made using semiconductor technology. The conventional wisdom is that their cost will plummet over time, much the way the cost of computers has. “They’ll get this price down,” assures James Brodrick, Ph.D., an electrical engineer with the DOE. According to Brodrick, lighting makes up at least 10 to 11 percent of a home’s total electricity use, and long-lasting LED bulbs could cut monthly lighting bills by 80 percent. “By 2020, I would expect LED lighting to be in quite a few homes,” he says. “Compact fluorescents will probably be around, but LEDs and OLEDs will be more efficient than any CFL.”
Green for Good
The push by both public and private entities to develop energy-efficient products indicates a strong long-term market for energy-conserving homes. It may have been spurred by the recent economic crisis and subsequently enacted federal tax credits, but it’s not likely to disappear once the economy rebounds. “There is the perception now that as the economy grows, we will see a strong spiking of energy costs again,” says Kermit Baker, Ph.D., chief economist for the AIA and director of the Remodeling Futures Program at Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies. “There’s a sense that we should be concerned about future energy costs.” Forward-thinking builders are using buzzwords such as “net-zero home” and “high-performance building.” A handful are following the ambitious Passive House standard created in Germany. “Passive House has just started to explode in the U.S.,” says Stephen Aiguier of Green Hammer in Portland, Ore.
Also, government energy-use regulations are tightening. The 2009 version of the International Energy Conservation Code, which serves as a model for municipalities nationwide, was 15 percent more energy-efficient than the 2006 version. Green building consultant Jay Hall bets it will be even tougher next time. “For 2012, the expectation is that it will be another 15 percent higher,” he says. “The code is going green.”
Energy efficiency may be on everyone’s radar, but the sleeper environmental issue of the next decade, builders and environmentalists say, will be water conservation. “We have seen the conversation taken up a notch recently in regions where water is not typically considered a problem,” reports Virginia Lee, team leader for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s WaterSense program. She points to drought, population growth, and aging infrastructure as factors in anticipated water shortages, and notes that the availability and performance of water-efficient products have improved greatly in the past couple of years.