What fraction of apartment buildings in California have double-pane windows? What fraction of commercial buildings in SF/East Bay have operable windows to take advantage of natural ventilation?
Most houses in the bay area do not even have AC, and may turn on the heater for 3 months of the year. It's climate alone is a big household energy saver.
Indeed. The Bay Area is one of the most environmentally friendly areas to live for this reason.
Economist Ed Glazer makes the argument that by not allowing more housing to be built there, more people have to live in more energy consumptive locations (Houston, for example). Housing development policy of the Bay Area has a big environmental impact.
Coastal regions tend to have more stable temperatures than inland regions in general due to closer proximity to the ocean (large bodies of water tend to be slow to heat up and slow to cool down). The Bay Area is no exception.
> What fraction of apartment buildings in California have double-pane windows?
One thing that amazed me when moving to California a couple of years ago was reading ads for apartments where the text would gush about the apartment having double glazing!!!1!!
Meanwhile, in Sweden, triple glazing has been the required minimum since the 90s, and older buildings were forced to install a third pane or retrofit new windows or somehow bring it up to code.
These days you can get quadruple glazed windows, but they offer only a very small improvements to triple glazed, so there's not much use.
For some years I lived in a rowhouse in the Maryland suburbs of DC, built about 1983. The units there had double glazing. Maryland does not have an especially cold climate.
Where I live now we have single panes, but behind storm windows.
On the other hand, we know a family near Boston who live in a big old house. The husband, a mathematician, calculated that they would never recover the cost of replacing the windows. I don't know how far out he calculated, but I expect it was about 20 years.
Double glazing is common for all new installs. And people will tend to use them for retrofits unless they are trying to cheap out. As for California, it doesn't get cold enough here to pay the premium for triple glazing.
My apartment in SF has operable windows, as do most older buildings I've been in. I don't have an air conditioner, and I rarely use the steam heater thingy (radiator?).
