As a nation, our buildings will play a pivotal role in achieving our clean energy future. Buildings are where we live, work, and play—so it makes sense that we spend 90% of our time in buildings and that our buildings use a substantial amount of energy. Residential and commercial buildings are among the largest sources of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in the country. To address the impact of buildings, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) led development of a blueprint for decarbonizing U.S. buildings by 2050. The blueprint provides a national strategy for aggressively reducing GHG emissions while delivering equity, affordability, and resilience benefits to communities.
The GHG reduction goals in the blueprint are clear: With emissions data from 2005 as a starting point, the goal is to reduce GHG emissions from U.S. buildings 65% by 2035 and 90% by 2050. The roadmap identifies actions the federal government can take to enable the United States to meet specific targets for increasing building energy efficiency, accelerating on-site emissions reductions, transforming the grid edge, and minimizing embodied life cycle emissions. Federal agency coordination and support for state and local actions is essential to accelerate the transition to low-carbon buildings.
The blueprint relies on original analysis and strategic thinking conducted by DOE national laboratories and benefits from the leadership of states that previously developed their own strategies. DOE worked closely with other U.S. federal agencies, particularly the Department of Housing and Urban Development and Environmental Protection Agency, and a wide range of DOE experts to finalize this blueprint.
The national strategy reflects the central role that buildings play in achieving economy-wide climate goals. The buildings decarbonization blueprint promotes American prosperity by supporting thriving and resilient communities, high-quality jobs, energy and economic security, energy justice, and healthy environments.
Goals and Strategic Objectives
“Decarbonizing the U.S. Economy by 2050: A National Blueprint for the Buildings Sector” sets three cross-cutting goals of equity, affordability, and resilience. The equity goal ensures that the low-carbon buildings transition benefits disadvantaged communities. Disadvantaged communities span a diverse set of urban, suburban, and rural settings and may each have unique needs and decarbonization challenges.
The Biden-Harris Administration made a national commitment to environmental justice through the Justice40 Initiative, which sets a goal that 40% of the overall benefits of certain federal investments flow to disadvantaged communities that are marginalized, underserved, and overburdened by pollution.
The affordability goal focuses on reducing energy costs so that everyday Americans can have greater access to energy efficient improvements. Efforts to make low-carbon building solutions more affordable must prioritize underserved communities. DOE’s Affordable Home Energy Shot initiative is one example of how this can be done. The Inflation Reduction Act, the largest investment in clean energy and climate action in U.S. history, is also providing rebates, tax credits, and financing to cut energy costs and emissions in buildings with enhanced incentives for underserved communities and a commitment to Justice40.
Resilience is the third cross-cutting goal and focuses on increasing the ability of communities to withstand stresses so that buildings are structurally durable as well as inhabitable during extreme heat and cold events with power outages.
Alongside those three cross-cutting goals, the blueprint identifies four strategic objectives with specific performance targets that enable overall emission reductions. These building-focused objectives aim to:
- Increase building energy efficiency.
- Accelerate on-site emissions reductions.
- Transform the grid edge.
- Minimize embodied life cycle emissions.
The blueprint also notes that to achieve the 2050 vision, federal actions will be set into implementation stages that must span four categories:
- Maximize technology performance and affordability.
- Develop markets and enable deployment.
- Provide direct funding and financing.
- Lock in cost-effective performance gains.
The implementation stages include:
- Near-term (now through 2030): Activities catalyze the transition to a deeply decarbonized buildings sector and lay the initial groundwork for future gains.
- Mid-term (2030–2040): Activities increase progress and further scale deployment by learning from near-term challenges and successes.
- Long-term (2040–2050): Activities address remaining building emissions sources and complete the transition.
The blueprint points out building resilience measures such as increasing the passive efficiency of building structures by upgrading existing envelopes to current code or beyond-code energy performance levels. This improves structural durability and thermal resilience, extends the habitability of structures during extreme heat and cold events with power outages, and decreases excess mortality. Another example—for urban locations especially—are measures such as cool roofs and pavements and increased vegetation that can reduce heat islands and make cities less vulnerable to extreme heat impacts.
The 130 million existing buildings in the United States include many different energy uses and GHG emissions sources. Meanwhile, the long lifetimes of buildings and their components mean that today’s buildings will still comprise most of the U.S. building stock in 2050. Thus, to achieve this blueprint’s vision, it is critical to accelerate deployment of low-carbon solutions in both new construction and in existing buildings—particularly in disadvantaged communities, where building upgrades are most needed.
Impact of Decarbonizing the Buildings Sector
Decarbonizing the buildings sector has additional broad benefits—including saving people money, improving the quality of homes and commercial buildings, reducing the size of new power grid infrastructure, and enabling fast, secure, and interactive distributed energy resources like on-site solar panels, battery storage, and electric vehicle charging.
Federal actions can accelerate the impact of building decarbonization through early-stage research and development that raises the ceiling on maximum technology performance and improves affordability; deployment and market stimulation activities that remove barriers to technology adoption and spur further market penetration of commercialized and emerging technologies; and efficiency standards and building codes that raise the floor of minimum performance and lock in proven cost-effective low-carbon technologies for mainstream adoption. Strategic coordination across these different types of actions increases their potential to accelerate deployment of high-performance, low-carbon building solutions over time.
The blueprint sets a clear vision to decarbonize buildings in ways that reduce GHG emissions while ensuring equity, affordability, and resilience. The blueprint’s goals are made actionable by strategic objectives, performance targets, and coordinated actions at the federal, state, local, and tribal levels. The publication of this blueprint is another example of DOE’s unwavering focus on transitioning to an affordable and accessible clean energy economy in America.
Katherine Kaplan is the chief strategy officer at the DOE’s Office of the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Buildings and Industry. Download the U.S. buildings decarbonization blueprint here.