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Making It Happen: Achieving Energy Efficiency in Multi-Family Buildings Housing Low-Income Tenants
Abstract
Saving energy in multi-family buildings
is a comparatively easy task to accomplish in
theory: engineering science has shown us how
to reduce heatloss and air infiltration, how
to balance systems and improve heating plant
efficiency, and how to capture warmth from the
air, the earth and the sea. But getting this
knowledge into multi-family buildings and making
them energy efficient in fact is very difficult,
especially if those buildings house low-income
and elderly tenants, the people for whom saving
energy is most urgent.
Energy practitioners have found that multifamily
building owners are not buying energy
efficiency because it is not being marketed intelligently;
affordable financing is very difficult
to obtain, and energy education tailored to the
needs of owners, occupants and maintenance crews
is practically unknown. This paper discusses
how four non-profit energy companies, located
in major cities, overcame these obstacles. It
explains how they market energy conservation
improvements, how they finance them, and how
they involve tenants in energy education; i.e.,
how they make energy efficiency happen in multifamily
buildings.
Citation
Haun, C. R. (1985). Making It Happen: Achieving Energy Efficiency in Multi-Family Buildings Housing Low-Income Tenants. Energy Systems Laboratory (http://esl.tamu.edu); Texas A&M University (http://www.tamu.edu). Available electronically from https : / /hdl .handle .net /1969 .1 /6858.