Making buildings more energy efficient is often described as “low-hanging fruit” for achieving dramatic energy savings and reduced greenhouse-gas emissions. While many people appreciate the complexity of building new renewable energy projects or introducing electric or natural gas-powered vehicles, the building sector is widely perceived as rife with the potential to reduce energy consumption through the application of available, existing technologies but somehow unable to fully realize this potential to date.
As lawyers who have worked on energy efficiency in commercial buildings, we believe that the low-hanging fruit analogy is fundamentally sound. Many of the barriers that have frustrated large-scale energy efficiency investment are being lowered quickly by a new combination of policies, technologies, incentives and mechanisms for sharing successes and data. Amid all the focus on hydraulic fracturing and other sources of energy supply, we expect that the harvesting of energy efficiency benefits in the years ahead will also attract substantial new capital investment and deliver benefits across the commercial building sector.
