Re-Inventing Building Energy Codes as Technology and Market Drivers

Global climate change, with a time frame of decades not years, encourages policy makers to pay more attention to new construction in addition to the retrofitting of existing buildings and to upgrading the efficiency of fast-turnover appliances and lighting. Increased interest in advanced building energy codes is reflected in proposed federal legislation to set multiyear energy code targets leading to zero-energy buildings. The expectation of continuous, staged improvements in building codes – coupled with voluntary market transformation – can help drive long-term demand for energy-efficient building designs, construction materials, and installed equipment. For building energy codes to serve as market-drivers not just followers, we need to revitalize the code development process; strengthen incentives and mandates for code adoption, compliance, and enforcement; and encourage beyond-code building practices. Increasingly stringent goals for energy codes will challenge current processes of code development, adoption, compliance, and enforcement, and may require a transition from prescriptive to performancebased code compliance, or perhaps a mixed system. In the future, incorporating “building life-cycle performance” into energy codes would require accounting for building or component lifetimes and reaching beyond the design stage to address construction quality, acceptance testing, long-term performance, and the role of occupants. Beyond today’s common metric, annual energy use per square meter of floor space, future codes could address: electricity load shape and demand-responsiveness, environmental impacts, embodied energy, metrics based on occupancy instead of (or in addition to) conditioned floorspace, code requirements or credits for features that enable future technology upgrades, subdivision- and community-scale energy systems, “locational” efficiency, and “progressive efficiency” criteria that require higher performance from larger homes and buildings.