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Aren’t larger, opulent home designs far more difficult to make energy efficient?

Generally, yes. They tend to have a lot of corners (for their "architectural features" checklist), and those are really hard to insulate well.

They also tend to be purchased by people who don't care in the slightest about energy efficiency, because if you can buy a $10M home, the difference between $500/mo or $1500/mo in energy costs doesn't matter to you.

Competing element though is they probably have more land to put solar on, so if they don't find it to be aesthetically incompatible, they could probably push through those energy losses.

Sure, and they could shrug off the cost of installing a ground-source heat pump[1] too, which would be too expensive for more modest homes. But they'd again have to give a damn, which I am only semi-optimistic about...

1: https://www.energy.gov/eere/articles/5-things-you-should-kno...

Yeah, this strikes me similarly to the all-electric Hummer SUV. What on earth are we doing here.

In theory, taking something people were already buying in a highly polluting form, and giving them the option to buy the same thing in a less polluting form.

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