Valencia – National Energy and Environmental Building Leader

You may know Ideal’s Valencia neighborhood has been the metro’s best-selling neighborhood for more than 10 years. You may not know that the community has been a leader in energy and environmental building since before the first foundation was dug. All this comes as no surprise, as Ideal has long been a leader in energy efficiency and sustainable building.Energy Firsts:

• First gold-level Green Certified Home in Oklahoma
• First LEED Certified Home in the U.S.
• First affordable Zero Energy Home in the U.S.
• First line of affordable Energy Star Homes in the U.S.

When development of the 640-acre Valencia neighborhood began, the company’s developers looked for ways to include energy saving practices in the community’s infrastructure. The result was a system of holding ponds, riparian corridors and solar powered irrigation that maintained the community in an environmentally friendly, sustainable way. Today, Valencia has outgrown solar power for community irrigation, but water from the community splash pad has been directed into the ponds instead of into the sewer system. Ideal’s commitment to sustainability and innovation has put several of its neighborhoods at the forefront of groundbreaking development practices. Several homes built in Valencia have tested building concepts for local and national organizations such as the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Environmental Quality. These groups point to Ideal Homes as an example of doing things the “right” way. The Zero: The first house built in Valencia was a newsmaker. America’s first Zero Energy House built in the less than $200,000 category made headlines with its electric meter spinning backward. Every Ideal home is built to the company’s EnergyAdvantage standards but reducing average heating and cooling usage on most Ideal homes to zero, takes adding renewable energy technology to the mix. At that time, the technology was readily available for a true Zero, a home that produces about as much energy as it consumes. The trick was cost, as prices for the technology could easily push homes into the million-dollar range. Ideal wanted to test the idea to see if their high-performance building practices, coupled with new technology, could bring in a Zero at an affordable price. Ideal’s Zero included:

• Photo voltaics (solar panels)
• Ground source heat pumps
• Tankless hot water systems
• Energy recovery ventilation

Ideal learned valuable lessons from every one of its test homes and has incorporated the best of them into all its houses. While they may not all, be Zeros, today, every Valencia home has Guaranteed Heating and Cooling Usage: Ideal Homes is the only builder in Oklahoma to Guarantee Low Heating and Cooling usage on most Ideal homes. Through a partnership with Environments for Living, if actual usage goes over the guarantee, Ideal will pay you the difference.