Cleantech Blog has a rundown of some issues from a recent home performance conference, on getting home performance ratings to work. That is, how do you convey how green a home is during resale? This is definitely something that we'd like to see CWLP get into, since it enables a market response to differences in home energy performance. What if CWLP could do a basic assessment of a house's energy efficiency, and give you one number that made it easy to compare across houses, when you're shopping for a new home?
We already have a number of things you have to sign off on when closing a home. What if "house performance audit" was one of those things that you could legally demand from a seller?
And why not take it beyond just the energy used by the home itself? What if we could develop an accessibility measure that told you how accessible the house was to nearby services? That is, so many grocery stores with 5 minute radius and a 15 minute radius, that sort of thing? Simply by providing this information in a comparable format, you give people who value green homes the information they need to make the best choice.