This week in buildings, industry and land use decarbonization news, James Downing covered a report from Sierra Club that explained how firms building data centers and other new, major sources of demand can ensure they have clean energy to run their operations. Many of the companies building data centers also have strong clean energy and climate goals. The report endorses matching clean energy with demand 24/7 in states with retail markets, and how to work with regulated utilities to expand clean energy.

The Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas released a working paper looking into whether utility bill shocks spur customers to invest in efficiency. The researchers found that after a bill spike, customers were 22% more likely to invest in efficiency and utilities may be able to leverage them to expand their efficiency efforts. 

Several Senate Democrats are asking the Federal Housing Finance Agency to pass new rules that would require new homes to be more energy efficient, Grist reported. The rules would set a new baseline for new homes, which would raise their initial costs by an average of $7,200 but save around $15,000 over the course of a 30-year mortgage. 

The new Labour Party government in the United Kingdom is requiring landlords to increase the efficiency of their properties; Bloomberg has the details. The move could lift 1 million families from “fuel poverty,” U.K. Energy Secretary Ed Miliband said. 

Another policy from Europe was highlighted in a recent piece in The Atlantic, which highlighted a Swedish district energy plant that is using massive versions of the heat pumps that Americans have been installing to heat individual homes. The Stockholm plant uses heat pumps the size of a house to pump warm water for heat to homes across the city. 

Read all that and more in this week’s Intelligence Report: