Building Performance Standards: Lessons from Carbon Policy

This report assesses the various tradeoffs and challenges of designing building performance standards (BPS) in order to facilitate compliance and promote cost-effectiveness.

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Date

Oct. 29, 2020

Authors

Véronique Bugnion and Karen Palmer

Publication

Report

Reading time

1 minute

Summary

This paper reviews the relevant design elements of carbon and environmental markets and explores how they could influence the design of BPS programs. Carbon and environmental markets have existed for more than three decades, giving policymakers experience with scope and target setting and the design of flexibility provisions. The paper also sketches out how the sector-specific BPS programs overlap and interact with existing cross-sectoral programs—state-level clean energy and renewable portfolio standards (RPS), the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), electricity markets, and transport electrification.

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Topics

Authors

Véronique Bugnion

Co-founder and CEO of ClearlyEnergy,

Karen Palmer

Senior Fellow

Karen Palmer is a senior fellow at Resources for the Future and an expert on the economics of environmental, climate and public utility regulation of the electric power sector.

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