Historical Context

In 2009 the Vice President and the White House Council on Environmental Quality called upon the Department of Energy (DOE) to create a home energy rating system. The White House’s 2009 report, Recovery through Retrofit, identified the lack of straightforward and reliable information about homes’ energy use as a key barrier to homeowner investment in home energy upgrades or improvements.

To address this barrier, DOE developed a voluntary program to help homeowners understand their home’s energy use and prioritize cost-effective energy improvements. The goal was to allow homeowners to easily and affordably find out how their home’s energy performance compares with other homes in the same area, much like the vehicle mile-per-gallon rating. According to guiding principles, the system must be:

  1. Credible, reliable and replicable

  2. Transparent and easy to understand

  3. Affordable

  4. Subject to effective quality control

DOE sought to utilize an online tool (the Home Energy Simulation Training), developed by DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, to train candidate Assessors to collect and input the data into the online Scoring Tool. The result would be a report or label that provides the following information:

  • A Home Energy Score on a scale of 1 to 10 (where a “10” is a home that uses less energy than 90% of homes in the U.S.), presented with clear and simple graphics to help homeowners understand their home’s energy performance and how it compares to other homes;

  • An estimate of how much money could be saved on energy bills by making the recommended energy improvements; and

  • An individualized list of recommended energy retrofit improvements that are estimated to payback in ten years or less.

After a year of industry research, analysis and development, DOE launched a pilot program to test the Home Energy Score. Building on the results of the pilots and other research, including industry factors and homeowner motivations, DOE officially launched the Home Energy Score nationwide in 2012. It became the first national asset rating method that allows all US regions to opt into a simplified and standardized energy assessment process that complements existing advanced home energy audit methods.