Superefficient Buildings
Exploring Our Content
Introduction
A brief overview of the topic.
Before You Watch Our Lecture
Maximize your learning experience by reviewing these carefully curated videos and readings we assign to our students.
Our Lecture
Watch the Stanford course lecture.
Additional Resources
Find out where to explore beyond our site.
For more on building decarbonization, visit Stanford's Building Decarbonization Learning Accelerator.
Source: RMI/Amory Lovins
Introduction to
Superefficient Buildings
Residential and commercial buildings offer the most familiar and intuitive examples of how to make very large energy savings cost less than small or no savings. Additionally, buildings offer key decarbonization opportunities: 37% of global GHG emissions come from buildings, and buildings use 40% of global raw materials. Just operating buildings uses half the world’s electricity. Improving building energy efficiency also has the potential to improve people’s well-being, since we spend over 90% of our time in buildings.
The primary energy end uses in buildings are space heating and cooling, lighting, refrigeration, residential water heating, and electronics. Integrative design techniques, principles, and modes of thinking can offer energy and resource efficiency levels far greater than generally expected or attained using component optimization. For example, integrative design can often achieve 70%-90+% savings in buildings' final energy consumption, whereas component optimization like efficient technologies and smart controls can obtain, at best, about 30%-40% savings.
By artfully choosing, combining, sequencing, and timing fewer, simpler technologies, integrative design can often achieve astonishingly large savings at low, no, or negative extra cost, in buildings old and new, big and small, in any climate, style, and culture.
Before You Watch Our Lecture on
Superefficient Buildings
We assign these readings to our Stanford students alongside each lecture to help contextualize the lecture content. We encourage you to review the Essential readings below before watching the lecture. Include selections from the Optional and Useful list based on your interests and available time.
Essential
- Reinventing Fire: Buildings (Executive Summary). RMI. 2011. (2 pages)
Describes the opportunity for energy efficiency in the US buildings sector, as well as barriers and benefits to achieving super-efficient buildings. - Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System. Meadows, Donella H. The Sustainability Institute. December 1999. (19 pages)
Defines and explains leverage points in systems. Explains how to identify and target critical leverage points where interventions will be most efficient.
Optional and Useful
- Pioneering Net Zero Buildings: The Infosys Journey. Infosys. 2023. (54 pages)
Success stories and shared learning related to creating infrastructure with minimum environmental impact. - Getting to Zero Buildings Database. New Buildings Institute (NBI). 2022.
NBI works to identify, research, analyze, and promote commercial and multifamily buildings across North America that are leaders in low and zero energy. This interactive tool allows you to generate customized maps, lists, and charts from their database. - Energy for Sustainability, Second Edition: Foundations for Technology, Planning, and Policy (Chapter 6, Energy Efficiency for Buildings). Randolph, John and Masters, Gilbert. 2018. (51 pages) Find at a library near you
Explores energy technologies and opportunities in the buildings sector. - Energy-Efficient Buildings: Institutional Barriers and Opportunities. Lovins, Amory. 1993.
Why buildings are rarely built to use energy efficiently, despite the sizeable costs that inefficient designs impose on building owners, occupants, and the utility companies that serve them. - From Designing a House to Editing Text, Sometimes Less Is More. Klotz, L., Scientific American. May 12, 2022.
Briefly explores the benefits of subtracting rather than adding when seeking improvements.
Our Lecture on
Superefficient Buildings
This is Stanford University's Integrative Design for Radical Energy Efficiency course lecture on superefficient buildings. Given the length of this lecture (~3.5 hours), we have divided it into three separate videos. We strongly encourage you to watch all three videos to fully understand the massive impact buildings have on our energy use and the plethora of opportunities that exist for making them far more efficient without increasing costs. For a complete learning experience, we also encourage you to review the Essential readings we assign to our students in addition to watching the lecture.
Presented by: Amory Lovins, Lecturer, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Stanford University; Co-founder and Chairman Emeritus of RMI (formerly Rocky Mountain Institute)
Recorded: January 2025 Duration: 3 hours 36 minutes
Superefficient Buildings: Part 1—Integrative Design for Superefficient Buildings (81 minutes)
Table of Contents
(Clicking on a timestamp will take you to YouTube.)
0:00 Why Buildings Matter
2:09 Integrative Design in Buildings
7:49 Potential Energy Savings
11:55 Examples: Superefficient Buildings
19:48 Tunneling Through the Cost Barrier
23:57 Examples: Superefficient Housing
31:32 Superefficient Windows
34:27 Examples: Integrative Design Standouts
48:13 Retrofitting for Energy Efficiency
56:36 Net-Zero Energy Buildings
1:08:49 Sequencing in Whole Systems Design
Superefficient Buildings: Part 2—Passive-Solar Banana Farm Tour in Snowmass, Colorado
(55 minutes)
Table of Contents
(Clicking on a timestamp will take you to YouTube.)
00:00 Introduction
06:45 Heating and Insulation
12:23 Utility Room - Drying System
14:49 Energy and Batteries
16:09 Water Heating
18:48 Pipe Efficiency
21:16 Kitchen
31:18 Interior Jungle
42:18 Bathroom
44:11 Library
48:53 Integrative Design
Superefficient Buildings: Part 3—Passive Techniques and Equipment for Superefficient Buildings (79 minutes)
Table of Contents
(Clicking on a timestamp will take you to YouTube.)
00:00 Introduction and Passive Cooling
16:09 Active Air Handling: Basic Physics
18:39 Displacement Ventilation
24:45 Cooling Equipment
36:53 Passive Latent Heat Exchangers
40:11 Integrative Building Design
46:36 Superefficient Household Equipment
58:38 Outdoor Design Integration
1:07:16 Valuable Side Benefits
1:14:00 Beyond Mere Efficiency
Additional Resources About
Energy Efficient Buildings
Government and International Organizations
- International Energy Agency (IEA) Buildings
- The United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) Energy Efficiency in Buildings
- US Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Energy Efficiency & Renewable Energy Energy Efficiency: Buildings and Industry
- US Energy Information Administration (EIA) Use of Energy Explained: Energy Use in Commercial Buildings
- US Energy Information Administration (EIA) Today in Energy Commercial Buildings
- US Energy Information Administration Updated Buildings Sector Appliance and Equipment Costs and Efficiencies
- US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Building Codes for Energy Efficiency
- US Energy Star Commercial Buildings
- Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
- National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) Buildings
- California Energy Commission 2022 Building Energy Efficiency Standards
- Northwest Energy Efficiency Alliance
- Northeast Energy Efficiency Partnership