Sustainable housing comes in all shapes and sizes, and by 2020 California hopes that all of its new housing projects will benefit from net-zero energy consumption. But what exactly makes a home sustainable? Sustainability practices include materials, passive heating and cooling systems, energy harvesting, recycling, construction techniques and many other systems and technologies that are being developed everyday.
With so much continual innovation, California’s goal of making all new housing so energy efficient that it consumes no energy at all is foreseeable. While many agree that this, in fact, is the most responsible and intelligent approach to our increased energy consumption, developers and builders are divided over the potential financial hurdles that crop up from such a goal.
