Podcasts: July 15, 2013

A: The NHPC was founded a few years ago by a very diverse group of stakeholders interested in whole-home energy retrofits. The NHPC showed up at a time when the housing market was going down — when more retrofits began occurring. There was a concern by manufacturers, contractors, nonprofit groups, retailers, and the real estate sector regarding how we could address that retrofit market with high-quality, whole-home work. Rather than using a piecemeal approach, we decided to look at the house as a system and make sure the contractor understands building science and that there are programs investing in that.

Q: The NHPC recently made headlines by releasing a home-performance industry white paper, titled: “Bringing on the Boom and Beating the Bust: A Framework for Developing a Roadmap to a Successful Home Performance Industry.” Can you tell us a little more about this exciting endeavor?

A: This is a project we worked on for more than a year – intensively for the last six months – and really since the beginning of NHPC. We’ve talked with stakeholders, and the more we’ve learned from the stimulus money that’s been out there backing home-performance work, the Better Buildings Program, the Energy Star program, and about the challenges and opportunities to advancing whole-home performance, the more we wanted to start a dialogue and freshen it up by putting out what we’ve learned and seen. We think this solution may make sense and it isn’t as if this isn’t happening across the industry, but we’re hoping to hone in all the experts regarding some of the points we discuss in this paper.

Kara Saul Rinaldi
Executive director, National Home Performance Council (NHPC)
http://www.nhpci.org

Publication date: 7/15/2013 

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