
Inefficient Building Electrification Will Require Massive Buildout of Renewable Energy and Seasonal Energy Storage
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Built with purpose by Harvard researchers to quantify the health benefits of energy efficiency measures in buildings.
Welcome to the public beta version of the Co-Benefits of the Built Environment (CoBE) tool. This tool is useful to anyone who works with energy and buildings, wants to better understand the impact of their energy consumption, and is interested in reducing that impact. This tool may be particularly valuable to building owners, operators, and investors, especially those in locations where buildings will be affected by climate policies in the near future.
The CoBE tool can be used to assess current building performance, as well as for future planning. The tool provides a footprint of building portfolios— consisting of the portfolio’s emissions (greenhouse gas and air pollutants), climate impacts, and public health impacts of building energy use— while benchmarking emission intensities against climate policies.
We are always working on ways to make this tool more meaningful. In this version, you will find enhancements that include: