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The US buildings sector faces a confluence of challenges, including a clear necessity to decarbonize the built environment to mitigate climate change, a need for greater resilience in the face of more frequent extreme weather events, a dearth of affordable housing, and flat or declining construction productivity that hinders the sector’s ability to adapt. Better data and guidance on new and existing residential buildings can outline paths forward for the market. These can help clarify stakeholder priorities and highlight applications for new (or newly relevant) technologies and approaches that have the potential to break traditional barriers, bridge technical gaps, reduce costs, create added value, and enable decarbonization of the national residential building stock. Decarbonizing the national building stock before 2050 will require massive increases in zero-carbon retrofits and new construction in this decade. By 2030, whole-home retrofit activity must increase several fold, and virtually all new construction will need to be zero carbon. It is difficult to imagine achieving this transformation without substantial changes in how buildings are constructed and retrofitted. By employing innovative building technologies and modernized construction techniques, while leveraging novel business models and aggregated demand, the residential construction industry has the opportunity to deliver energy-efficient, zero-carbon-aligned, and ultimately cost-effective new and retrofitted homes at scale, with streamlined delivery and consistent quality. This report provides product manufacturers, fabricators, contractors and installers, design professionals, owners, and real estate developers with technical performance and cost guidance for scalable zero-carbon-aligned new construction pathways and retrofit packages across the nation’s climate regions. The report builds on market research, stakeholder engagement, and modeling and analysis by the Advanced Building Construction Collaborative and its national laboratory partners. Market stakeholders can use this information to focus their strategic and project-level decision-making to drive zero-carbon-aligned buildings within the limited time frame for decarbonization. Though the report does not provide policy recommendations, public-sector stakeholders may also see it as a useful input into their decision-making.The information in this report can serve as a springboard for further development and refinement of specific physical solutions — such as construction products and assemblies — that can achieve necessary performance levels to meet climate goals. It can also inform business models that can deploy these physical solutions at scale and enabling financial and technical tools. In particular, it can be relevant to stakeholders in the emergent advanced building construction (ABC) market.

The significant share of the building sector in Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emission and final energy consumption makes it a significant target for decarbonization programs. Different standards and technological roadmaps propose several technical solutions to mitigate buildings’ climate change impact, such as improving existing and new buildings’ energy and environmental performance by utilizing Renewable Energy Sources (RES) and Energy Storage Systems (ESS). This study aims to examine and quantify the potential of two recommended solutions with a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) approach, including Building-Integrated Photovoltaic (BIPV) and Thermal Energy Storage (TES) systems, to achieve the building decarbonization targets. Therefore, a residential building is analyzed under three different scenarios, and the CO2equivalent emission alongside the avoided carbon emission and Environmental Payback Period (EPBP) of each scenario are assessed and compared.The result shows that applying a coupled BIPV-TES system in a residential building equipped with electric heat pumps can reduce CO2 eq emission by 21.42% over 30 years of the building service life.

Racist and discriminatory policies of the past — such as chronic disinvestment and redlining — have created environmental, health and socioeconomic inequality in many low-income communities and communities of color. Building decarbonization provides an opportunity to address these inequalities and design new policies that center equity and are intentional in providing benefits to the communities who need them most. A robust understanding of the broader equity implications of decarbonizing the building sector is key to ensuring that existing disparities are not perpetuated and that the benefits and opportunities beyond mitigating greenhouse gas emissions are fully realized. While this work provides an opportunity to address inequality, there may also be unintended negative consequences that result from these efforts if equity is not prioritized. This report examines equity in building decarbonization, synthesizing current literature, frameworks and reports to provide a cross-sectoral understanding of the critical issues and opportunities at the intersection of climate, health, energy, and housing. It serves to provide awareness of the interconnectedness of these issues and promote collaboration in creating holistic, equity-centered policies and programs — ones that not only reduce greenhouse gas emissions but address critical issues and opportunities related to health and safety, energy burden, accessibility, and housing and labor.

Buildings play a key role in the transition to a low-carbon-energy system and in achieving Paris Agreement climate targets. Analyzing potential scenarios for building decarbonization in different socioeconomic contexts is a crucial step to develop national and transnational roadmaps to achieve global emission reduction targets. This study integrates building stock energy models for 32 countries across four continents to create carbon emission mitigation reference scenarios and decarbonization scenarios by 2050, covering 60% of today's global building emissions. These decarbonization pathways are compared to those from global models. Results demonstrate that reference scenarios are in all countries insufficient to achieve substantial decarbonization and lead, in some regions, to significant increases, i.e., China and South America. Decarbonization scenarios lead to substantial carbon reductions within the range projected in the 2 °C scenario but are still insufficient to achieve the decarbonization goals under the 1.5 °C scenario.

The building sector is responsible for approximately 40% of global energy consumption and carbon emissions, making it a key area of focus in addressing the urgent global challenge of climate change and in achieving the 1.5-degree target. This study concentrated on building decarbonization, using bibliometric and network visualization analyses based on a dataset of 2494 publications retrieved from the Web of Science up to 25 June 2023. Findings revealed a rapid growth in publications, with China being the largest contributor (approximately 31%). Notably, the journals of Cleaner Production and Applied Energy emerged as the most influential journal in this field. Although leadership teams and authors have gained prominence, cross-national collaboration and communication among them remain limited. Furthermore, an analysis of keywords and co-citations revealed that the main research themes and hotspots encompass “energy”, “life cycle assessment”, “storage”, and related “models” and decarbonization “strategies”. As the field progresses, a clear trend toward multidisciplinary integration and diversified research directions and content was observed. Researchers can further concentrate their efforts on countries with historically limited research but substantial emissions, and enhance international collaboration and interdisciplinary integration. Overall, this study offers valuable insights for researchers and facilitates future investigations in the field of building decarbonization.

Decarbonizing the urban environment has two significant challenges: Increasing electricity demand due to the electrification of space heating and increased renewables share in the electricity supply. The European Commission defines a new grid support mechanism for peak-shaving products in renewed Electricity Market Design. This aims to enable a new market tool to stabilize electric supply and demand. This study examines a grid-integrated thermal storage device's technical feasibility and economic performance to meet net zero building (nZEB) definitions. Alternative scenarios considering current national nZEB targets, present energy market options, and regulations are compared using the life cycle cost and the global warming potentials over the building lifetime. The results show that better building performance is possible even with a low investment increase of 6.7% compared to minimum building standards based on regulations. This enables older building cases to perform similarly with new building targets for Turkish National nZEB. Building electrification using heat pumps and thermal storage systems gives similar economic performances in the long term when a dynamic electricity tariff is available. Adapting the life cycle approach to decision-making in construction contracts can lead to a 50% decrease in building emissions while staying within the same construction budget. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]