Earth Advantage

Earth Advantage is the administrator of cooling portland which is funded by the city's portland clean energy community benefits fund (pcef). The program is working to provide life-saving and efficient portable heat pump/cooling equipment to low-income portlanders, prioritizing those most vulnerable to the impacts of extreme heat fueled by climate change. Earth Advantage purchases and warehouses equipment and pays community-based organizations and affordable housing providers to install the equipment in the homes of qualifying portland households. The goal is to install 15,000 units over a 5-year period.

Earth Advantage offers educational programs that include internships, public workshops, contractor classes, builder, appraiser and realtor trainings, program updates, and expert speakers addressing energy efficiency and green building. Additionally, Earth Advantage offers professional accreditation regarding green building expertise for contractors, designers, realtors, workforce entrants and appraisers in several different states. These classes are offered locally in-person when possible, in other locales by partners and online. Earth Advantage also works in partnership with clearesult and trc to support programs at energy trust of Oregon and the northwest energy efficiency alliance.

Earth Advantage certification standards are some of the oldest and most respected green home certifications in the united states. They rely largely on field inspections to verify compliance with green building standards. Earth Advantage offers five possible levels of certification silver, gold and platinum, zero energy ready and zero energy. The Earth Advantage certification levels depend on points earned within five pillars of green building performance and onsite solar preparation and installation. Earth Advantage standards are used on single- and multi-family residences. The standards are used to guide the work of both non-profit affordable housing developers and for-profit housing developers. (continued on schedule o)multiple Oregon cities and the state utilize the Earth Advantage standards as qualifications for programs and access to benefits. Earth Advantage also certifies projects to other standards including: leed for homes, energy star, passive house, epa watersense, epa indoor airplus, resnet hers index, and energy trust energy performance score.

Software development: since 2017 Earth Advantage has developed the green building registry as a software as a service (saas) platform providing the real estate market with verified green home data. Earth Advantage developed this software in order to allow public access to green home data and to provide an application programming interface (api) to real estate multiple listing services for real-time data population of real estate listings. The software allows energy assessors to pull data from verified sources like the u.s. department of energy home energy score and generate streamlined, market-facing home labels for use by home sellers, home buyers and real estate and finance professionals. In 2022 the number of records in the registry exceeded 2 million homes sourced from over 10 green building organizations.earth Advantage provides policy developement and program implementation services for home energy labeling programs. Earth Advantage provides home energy score assessor training and mentoring, quality assurance of home scoring both in person and remotely, and dispute resolution of scores. Earth Advantage provides technical consultation for home energy score policy development at the city and state level across the united states. In 2019, Earth Advantage launched the home energy labeling partnership (help) for local governments to have a peer-to-peer environment to learn about these policies.earth Advantage is the fiscal sponsor for the zero coalition. The zero coalition was established in 2017, to address the need to advance energy-related home construction practices in Oregon. Earth Advantage gathered several likeminded nonprofits to form the zero coalition specifically focused on advancing Oregon building codes in alignment with executive order 17-20. In 2020 the focus expanded to support executive order 20-04 and the overall zero mission was redefined to focus on the wider scope of decarbonizing building operations in Oregon. Earth Advantage staff conduct administrative support duties and additional Earth Advantage staff participate in zero coalition committee work.