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.