Our house, built in 1952: roughly 1,000 square feet, all-electric, and still without insulation in its exterior walls. Lynne and I bought our house in 1989. It's a
modest one-story, three-bedroom ranch, built in 1952, with roughly 1,000 square
feet of conditioned space. Soon after we moved in, we replaced the windows,
blew insulation into the attic, and laid batts between the floor joists above
the crawlspace. More recently, we installed a ductless mini-split heat pump and
an electric-resistance water heater. The house is all-electric. The one thing
we never did was insulate the exterior walls, which remain as they were in 1952:
wood frame, siding, and empty cavities.
The City of Eugene is considering an ordinance
requiring sellers to disclose their home's energy score. A seller would hire a
licensed assessor to determine the U.S. Department of Energy Home Energy
Score—a rating from 1 to 10 with estimated energy costs and recommended
improvements—and include it in the listing. The proposed ordinance would not
require those improvements, nor would it mandate a minimum score. According to
the city's project page, a
typical assessment might cost $150 to $300. Portland, Hillsboro, Milwaukie, and
Bend have similar requirements. The council voted 5–3 in March to begin drafting an
ordinance, heard testimony on
September 21, and is tentatively scheduled to act on
October 28.
Image: U.S. Department of Energy, Home Energy Score Scoring
Methodology (2021).
The score is what DOE calls an asset rating. It
rates the house itself rather than how the people inside it live, so houses can
be compared on an equal basis. There's a hitch. The model assumes the number of
occupants equals the number of bedrooms plus one, so it estimates hot-water use
for our three-bedroom house as if four people lived here rather than two. DOE's
methodology also fixes the proportions of every detached house at a 5:3
rectangle. That simplification ignores the many houses that are long, narrow,
or irregular. A house with more exterior envelope per unit of enclosed volume
loses more heat than a compact one of the same floor area, yet the model treats
them the same if they have the same number of stories.
Three one-story plans of 1,000 square feet each. The
score models every detached house as the 5:3 rectangle at top.
How would our house fare? Without paying for
an assessment, I'd guess somewhere in the middle of the scale. The model
reflects total estimated energy use, not use per square foot, so small houses
fare better; Earth Advantage's
analysis of Portland scores found that homes of 501 to 1,500 square feet
averaged 5.2, while those of 2,501 to 5,000 square feet averaged 3.3.
The score uses source energy, which includes
the energy lost generating and delivering fuel to the house. DOE's national conversion
factor for electricity is 2.44; for natural gas it is 1.05,(1) so
electricity counts nearly two and a half times as much as gas. Our heat pump,
which delivers several units of heat per unit of electricity, roughly offsets
that penalty relative to a gas furnace. Our water heater does not. A
90-percent-efficient electric-resistance tank still scores worse than a
mediocre gas water heater once the conversion factor is applied, and the model
charges it for four people's hot-water use, not two. By my rough arithmetic, it
costs us about as much on the score as our uninsulated walls.
A home inspector would note favorably that we
installed our water heater last year. A home energy score report would likely
still recommend a heat-pump model when it's replaced. A heat-pump water heater
needs a large volume of surrounding air, or else louvers or ducting, and the
closet our water heater occupies offers neither of those. The model can't see
every quirk of a particular house. It wouldn't see the old ductwork still
connected to wall registers, now buried in our attic insulation, or our fireplace,
whose chimney may leak air despite the fireplace glass doors and a closed
damper. Only an optional blower-door test would reveal how much air either one
lets escape. An inspection tells a buyer what needs replacing; the home energy
score tells the buyer what the house will cost to run. Buyers need both.
Does the market pay attention to scores when
they're required? A study published in Land
Economics this July, covering more than 21,000 Portland sales
between 2018 and 2021, found that each additional energy-score point
corresponded with a price increase of roughly 0.8 percent (about $4,200 on the
average home in the sample). The city's staff report states
flatly that low-scoring homes do not see reduced sale prices. That goes further
than the evidence. If higher scores command a premium, lower scores sell at a
relative discount compared with otherwise similar homes. Low-scoring homes sell
for modestly less, broadly consistent with their higher expected energy costs,
though the largest single step falls between a score of 1 and 2. The market
appears to be pricing energy rather than stigmatizing older houses.
In Portland, homes sold for more as their scores rose, but the
gains came unevenly: a large step from 1 to 2, little change from 2 to 5, then
steadier gains above that. It belongs right after the paragraph on the Land Economics
study.
Enforcement matters as well. Portland, which
suspended the requirement during the pandemic and has since favored education
over fines, saw early compliance of roughly 55 to 64 percent; Bend, which
enforces its requirement, reports 83 percent. Research on Portland finds
that sellers of low-scoring homes are less likely to post their scores, so an
unenforced ordinance mostly informs buyers about the better houses.
Some of the ordinance’s critics raise points
worth weighing. At a meeting with staff, one Eugene realtor
distinguished between consumer protection and consumer choice. I'm agnostic
about this: we accept other mandated disclosures without complaint, lead-based
paint being the obvious example, but lead is a health hazard, while energy
inefficiency is perceived mainly as a cost. The case for disclosing a cost is
weaker, though not negligible, and home sales already carry so many
requirements that one more costing a few hundred dollars will not move the
needle much.
Four local architects who met with staff suggested the
score was redundant because architects already explain energy codes to their
clients. Energy codes govern new construction and alterations requiring
permits. They also noted that a policy triggered by sales never reaches homes
that aren't on the market.
Councilor Mike Clark, who voted against
drafting the ordinance in March but in June voted to send it to a public
hearing, has told the Eugene Weekly he
wants to keep housing "as affordable as humanly possible" without
duplicating efforts. His concern is a redesigned national appraisal form,
required for mortgages sold to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac beginning November 2,
which adds a section on
energy-efficient and green features. The overlap is genuine.
Still, an appraisal comes after an offer is accepted, too late for comparing
houses; it goes to the lender, not a public listing; and it describes features
without modeling energy use. Cash purchases involve no appraisal at all, and
the city's consultant, citing local market data, puts them at roughly a fifth
of recent Eugene sales. The two may even work together: DOE's score report
includes a reference energy-cost figure intended for appraisers.
Advocates tie the ordinance to Eugene's goal
of halving community fossil-fuel use by 2030, but the city's own report
concedes that disclosure alone is unlikely to deliver significant
greenhouse-gas reductions. Three-quarters of Eugene households heat with
electricity, most of it hydroelectric, so improving an all-electric house like
ours saves money but comparatively little carbon. The carbon is in natural gas,
and a fuel-neutral disclosure does little to move anyone off it. The national
source-energy factor also treats Eugene's largely hydroelectric power as if it
came from the average national grid.
Where does that leave me? Mildly in favor of
the requirement, with conditions. The ordinance is a modest, relatively
inexpensive disclosure measure. Its justification is consumer information, not
public health and not, in any meaningful sense, climate. It is worth adopting
if the city enforces it as Bend does, and if Eugene's reports reflect local
power and rates. It will not pay for a single upgrade, and it will not reach
renters or long-tenured owners like Lynne and me.
Would seeing the energy score for the house we
bought in 1989 and still occupy have changed our decision to buy it? Probably
not. More important to us were location, condition, whether it suited our needs, and
price. After a long search, our realtor urged us to act quickly, and we did.
EWEB's incentives later persuaded us to replace the windows and insulate the
attic and floor, projects that were expensive and disruptive. The incentives
for insulating the walls were insufficient, and we did not act. We were not awash
in money, and I didn't want a home-equity loan on top of our mortgage. Neither
cost nor disruption should have stopped us, but they did. The ordinance assumes
that information leads to action. We've had the necessary information for
thirty-seven years, yet our walls remain uninsulated. 
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