Do Building Efficiency Standards Work?

The Obama Administration is making energy efficiency a major instrument in its climate/global warming policy. For example, half of the reductions that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) projects are needed to meet its Clean Power Plan for existing power plants come from demand-side energy-efficiency programs. Essentially, EPA expects people to use much less electricity than before the policy implementation, which will result in less carbon dioxide emissions. With such expectations placed on this policy instrument, an economics professor at the Georgetown University decided to study the issue and found that there is no evidence that homes constructed in California use less electricity today than before the state building energy codes were enacted.(i)