When my husband Tom and I decided to build our home in Salisbury, Massachusetts, we knew that a super-efficient, even “zero energy” home was the goal. We worked with Brightbuilt Home to design a modular, all-electric home that was modeled to use about as much energy as the 8.83 kW solar array generates over the course of a year. This November, it will have been two years since we moved into the house.

The nutrition label for a banana that’s pictured below is a familiar example of standardization; these labels provide transparent reporting based on established testing.  Our society trusts this information, and uses it routinely for cooking and comparison shopping.