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The Applied Economics Office (AEO) of the Engineering Laboratory (EL) at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has developed the Building Industry Reporting and Design for Sustainability (BIRDS) database, which estimates the sustainability (energy, economic, and environmental) performance for eleven commercial building prototypes designed to different energy efficiency levels. Analysis of the BIRDS database estimates both the average percentage change in energy consumption and the aggregate changes in energy consumption for one year’s worth of new construction for each U.S. state. Due to the limited publically-available new construction data, the estimates are calculated by giving equal weighting to all the cities in a state that are included in the BIRDS database. However, such an approach leads to underweighting the importance of cities with more new construction and overweighting cities with less new construction. The purpose of this study is to explore the impact of implementing a non-equal weighting approach on state-level energy consumption impacts of adopting a more restrictive state energy code. New construction floor area completion data for 2012 was obtained for each county in the United States to assist in increasing the accuracy of these impact estimates.

iii Preface v Acknowledgements vii Acronyms and Abbreviations xiii Executive Summary xv

Although the construction industry is a major component of the U.S. economy, it has experienced a “perceived” prolonged period of decline in productivity. Due to the critical lack of measurement methods, however, the magnitude of the productivity problem in the construction industry is largely unknown. The measurement problem is exacerbated by the fact that the construction industry is composed of four sectors that differ significantly in the outputs produced, firm size, and use of technology. The four sectors, which taken together define the construction industry, are residential, commercial/institutional, industrial, and infrastructure. This report describes efforts underway that focus on the measurement of construction productivity at three levels—task, project, and industry—and how such measurements can be developed. This report analyzes the measurement challenges associated with the development of meaningful measures of construction productivity at the task, project, and industry levels and establishes a framework for addressing those challenges. Specifically, this report identifies the metrics, tools, and data needed to move forward in collaboration with key construction industry stakeholders. Once produced, these metrics, tools and data will help construction industry stakeholders make more cost-effective investments in productivity enhancing technologies and improved life-cycle construction processes; they will also provide stakeholders with new measurement and evaluation capabilities. Finally, this report lays the foundation for future research and for establishing key industry collaborations that will enable more meaningful measures of construction productivity to be produced at the task, project, and industry levels.