States who accepted American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) funding are required to adopt building energy codes that meet or exceed the 2009 International Energy Conservation Code for residential buildings and the ASHRAE 90.1-2007 standard for commercial buildings. Additionally, these states agreed to develop and implement training and enforcement programs to achieve 90% compliance with the target codes by 2017. This final provision requires that states measure and report the rate of compliance annually. For more details on state compliance, view an earlier post covering some of the common questions related to building energy code provisions.
Measuring compliance should be fairly straightforward, right? Unfortunately it isn’t. Historically, there has not been a single standard methodology by which states or localities have measured compliance. In the past couple of years a handful of energy code compliance studies have been conducted. Compliance rates reported in these studies ranged from 25% to over 80%. This variance is due not only to differences in actual compliance, but primarily in how compliance was measured. And, at the moment, there is no feasible way to compare energy code compliance rates across states because standard measuring methods do not exist.
Responding to this shortcoming, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) has been tasked with creating procedures to help states reach the required 90% compliance. Included in this work is a standardized methodology for measuring compliance to be used by all states, with the goal of generating comparable statewide compliance rates. In addition to the procedures and tools for measuring compliance, PNNL has also developed an online “Score + Store” application. This tool takes code compliance data collected in the field, processes and analyzes it to produce a statewide compliance rate. The tool can also provide additional compliance metrics such as the top three code requirements with the highest and lowest compliance rates. Pilot studies testing the feasibility of the procedures and tools developed by PNNL are currently underway in several states.
A recent TAP webcast from May 31, 2011, Policies and Procedures for Enhancing Code Compliance, included a discussion on how to assess and measure compliance as well as ways to enhance compliance through evaluation, third-party inspection and utility code programs. Preliminary findings from the PNNL pilot studies were also presented. Additionally, be sure to check out the State Compliance Evaluation Procedures developed by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Building Energy Code Program. This page contains links to the PNNL document, Measuring State Energy Code Compliance, residential and commercial compliance evaluation checklists, a demonstration of the Score + Store tool, along with other useful materials.
COMING SOON!
- Part II of this blog series reviews the second half of the referenced webcast, “Enhancing Code Compliance - How do we Improve it”
- TAP Factsheet: A companion factsheet to the May 31, 2011 Policies and Procedures for Enhancing Building Energy Code Compliance webcast
- Future Webcast: Exploring Partnerships to Further Building Code Compliance Enhancement
Content for this Blog post courtesy of Leslie Badger, Vermont Energy Investment Corporation