State’s new sustainable living community could change the way we build our homes: ‘It’s exciting and heartwarming to see how much they love it’

“We are very concerned about what climate warming is doing to the planet, and so we don’t want to be part of that contribution.”

A new affordable and eco-friendly community in Orange County, North Carolina, just got its first residents, and they’re already in love with the house, CBS 17 reported.

As of December 2023, Martha and Ken Williams are the first to complete and move into their home in Array Sustainable Living, a 54-acre community with a focus on environmentally friendly construction.

“It’s exciting and heartwarming to see how much they love it and how much they want to be here,” Jodi Bakst, a developer and realtor involved in the project, told CBS.

The Williams’ home and the other planned houses in the neighborhood were designed with features that lower energy usage, saving the residents money and reducing their impact on the Earth.

For example, the houses feature thicker walls, built using 2×6 lumber instead of the traditional 2×4. That means there’s more room for heavy-duty installation, which means the house stays at a comfortable temperature with less work from an air conditioner or furnace — just like this incredible passive house in Texas.

The design also incorporates more efficient appliances and fixtures, including a heat pump water heater, Energy Star-rated appliances, and LED light bulbs, CBS explained. All of these were chosen because they use less energy than traditional alternatives.

Perhaps best of all, the house comes already equipped with enough solar power to meet all its own energy needs, achieving net zero energy usage, according to CBS.

The benefit of all this efficiency is that it saves the owners money while protecting the environment. Using more energy from the grid means causing more pollution since much of the electricity generated in the U.S. comes from coal and other dirty energy sources. Gas appliances are even worse since they generate heat-trapping air pollution directly.

By lowering the home’s energy usage as much as possible and powering it all with non-polluting solar panels, an efficient home like this one eliminates the owner’s power bill and keeps tons of pollution out of the air. Those savings over the lifetime of the home more than outweigh the 6% increase in building costs — 4% to install solar and 2% for everything else.

As the Williams’ future neighbor Harini Rajagopalan told CBS, “We are very concerned about what climate warming is doing to the planet, and so we don’t want to be part of that contribution.”