What does today's green home look like? Is it an architecturally modern, windowless, concrete "bunker"; an eclectically designed "dome home" with solar panels and windmills on the roof; or a tiny, cramped bungalow with no garage and a front yard full of cactus?

Really, it's none of the above. In fact, an energy-efficient green home looks like the homes shown here. It looks just like any home in your typical suburban neighborhood: brick, stucco or stone walls with one or two stories, a front yard, a two-car garage and a front porch.

But behind its walls and throughout the construction process, a green home is very different and far superior to a typical home built today. Green homes are designed, inspected and built to much higher quality standards, with sustainable construction materials and technologically advanced products and systems.

Furthermore, green homes are much more material and energy efficient, and they create a much smaller carbon footprint than homes built just a few years ago.

To legally and correctly be labeled "green," a home must receive certification from professional energy raters that it has been built to nationally and regionally accepted green standards.

In the Corpus Christi Bay area, the Coastal Bend GreenBuilt (CBGB) program and the U.S. Government's ENERGY STAR program are the most widely utilized green residential certifications.

Green certification is not quick and easy; the process to certify a home to green standards has several steps, and it starts long before construction actually begins.

A green home must first be computer designed and drawn. After that, this virtual home is run through a series of energy modeling computer programs that test and refine its efficiencies.

Once the virtual home design surpasses the modeling standards, construction can finally begin. And during construction, a lot of work must be done. A green home has to be inspected and tested multiple times, at multiple stages by professional inspectors and engineers.

And when the home is completed, it is subjected to a new battery of tests to verify it actually performs to its virtual design standards.

You may think a green home must be dramatically more expensive than a typical new home. I mean, with all of this upfront work and multiple layers of testing and verification, a green home must cost more.

Well … it really doesn't have to.

That's right. A green home may cost 1 to 2 percent more than a typical code-minimum spec home. But those costs can be more than offset and quickly recovered by the lower energy bills that result from CBGB- and ENERGY STAR-certified construction methods.

The bills can, in fact, be up to 25 percent lower than a typical code-minimum home, and up to 50 percent lower than a used home built in the 1990s. How would you like to cut your energy bills in half?

So, now that you know a green home looks like the other homes around it, how do you know if the home you are looking at is certified green? Every builder will tell you his or her home is energy efficient, but only certified CBGB and ENERGY STAR homes have the data to prove they perform.

To easily verify that you are looking at a green home, simply locate the home's electric panel box, and look on the inside of the panel's door. If you see the CBGB and ENERGY STAR logo, you can rest assured that the home has been computer designed and modeled, as well as performance tested.

So, if you want to be a good steward of our environment, have a smaller carbon footprint and save up to 50 percent on your home energy bills, tell your realtor or homebuilder that you want to see a green-certified CBGB or ENERGY STAR home.

Our city has several green homes and neighborhoods available for you to tour. Go out and see a green home for yourself. Once you learn all the advantages of green, you will really be glad you did.

Bart Braselton is a third-generation builder and the executive vice president of Braselton Homes, Corpus Christi's oldest and largest homebuilder and neighborhood developer. For more information, visit www.braseltonhomes.com, or send an email to bart@braselthonhomes.com.