Home Energy Savings Are Made In The Shade

Trees positioned to shade the west and south sides of a house may decrease summertime electric bills by 5 percent on average, according to a recent study* of California homes by researchers from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).

The first large-scale study of its kind, the research paper considers the effects of shade on 460 single-family homes in Sacramento during the summer of 2007 and provides hard statistics showing how well-placed shade trees can reduce energy costs and atmospheric carbon, as well.

“People have known for a long time that trees have multiple benefits for people, but we’ve quantified one of them for the first time using actual billing data and put a dollar value on it,” said NIST’s David Butry, who authored the paper with Geoffrey Donovan of the USDA Forest Service’s Pacific Northwest Research Station.

The study’s findings included:

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