Do We Really Know how Much it Costs to Construct High Performance Buildings?
Abstract
Understanding the cost of energy efficient construction is critical to decision makers in building design, code development, and energy analysis. How much does it cost to upgrade from R-13 to R-19 in a building wall? How much do low-e windows really cost? Can we put a dollar figure on commissioning? Answers to these questions have a fuzzy nature, based on educated guesses and industry lore. The response depends on location, perspective, bulk buying, and hand waving. This paper explores the development of a web tool intended to serve as a publicly available repository of building component costs. In 2011 the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) funded the launch of a web tool called the Building Component Cost Community (BC3), dedicated to publishing building component costs from documented sources, actively gathering verifiable cost data from the users, and collecting feedback from a wide range of participants on the quality of the posted cost data. The updated BC3 database, available at http://bc3.pnnl.gov, went live on April 30, 2012. BC3 serves as the ultimate source of the energy-related component costs for DOE’s residential code development activities, including cost-effectiveness analyses. The paper discusses BC3 objectives, structure, functionality and the current content of the database.more »
- Authors:
- Publication Date:
- Research Org.:
- Pacific Northwest National Lab. (PNNL), Richland, WA (United States)
- Sponsoring Org.:
- USDOE
- OSTI Identifier:
- 1213025
- Report Number(s):
- PNNL-SA-88090
BT0400000
- DOE Contract Number:
- AC05-76RL01830
- Resource Type:
- Conference
- Resource Relation:
- Conference: 2012 ACEEE Summer Study on Energy Efficiency in Buildings: Fueling Our Future with Efficiency, August 12-17, 2012, Pacific Grove, California, 1-176 - 1-188
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
- Subject:
- building component cost, code requirements, IECC, component cost database
Citation Formats
Livingston, Olga V., Dillon, Heather E., Halverson, Mark A., Antonopoulos, Chrissi A., Madison, Michael C., and Lucas, Robert G. Do We Really Know how Much it Costs to Construct High Performance Buildings?. United States: N. p., 2012.
Web.
Livingston, Olga V., Dillon, Heather E., Halverson, Mark A., Antonopoulos, Chrissi A., Madison, Michael C., & Lucas, Robert G. Do We Really Know how Much it Costs to Construct High Performance Buildings?. United States.
Livingston, Olga V., Dillon, Heather E., Halverson, Mark A., Antonopoulos, Chrissi A., Madison, Michael C., and Lucas, Robert G. 2012.
"Do We Really Know how Much it Costs to Construct High Performance Buildings?". United States.
@article{osti_1213025,
title = {Do We Really Know how Much it Costs to Construct High Performance Buildings?},
author = {Livingston, Olga V. and Dillon, Heather E. and Halverson, Mark A. and Antonopoulos, Chrissi A. and Madison, Michael C. and Lucas, Robert G.},
abstractNote = {Understanding the cost of energy efficient construction is critical to decision makers in building design, code development, and energy analysis. How much does it cost to upgrade from R-13 to R-19 in a building wall? How much do low-e windows really cost? Can we put a dollar figure on commissioning? Answers to these questions have a fuzzy nature, based on educated guesses and industry lore. The response depends on location, perspective, bulk buying, and hand waving. This paper explores the development of a web tool intended to serve as a publicly available repository of building component costs. In 2011 the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) funded the launch of a web tool called the Building Component Cost Community (BC3), dedicated to publishing building component costs from documented sources, actively gathering verifiable cost data from the users, and collecting feedback from a wide range of participants on the quality of the posted cost data. The updated BC3 database, available at http://bc3.pnnl.gov, went live on April 30, 2012. BC3 serves as the ultimate source of the energy-related component costs for DOE’s residential code development activities, including cost-effectiveness analyses. The paper discusses BC3 objectives, structure, functionality and the current content of the database. It aims to facilitate a dialog about the lack of verifiable transparent cost data, as well as introduce a web tool that helps to address the problem. The questions posed above will also be addressed by this paper, but they have to be resolved by the user community by providing feedback and cost data to the BC3 database, thus increasing transparency and removing information asymmetry.},
doi = {},
url = {https://www.osti.gov/biblio/1213025},
journal = {},
number = ,
volume = ,
place = {United States},
year = {Fri Aug 31 00:00:00 EDT 2012},
month = {Fri Aug 31 00:00:00 EDT 2012}
}