Sustainability advocates are censuring the International Code Council because the ICC board removed mandatory provisions related to building decarbonisation readiness from its draft International Energy Conservation Code. 2024 and placed them in the optional appendix. The board’s March 18 action, motivated by appeals and taken against the recommendations of the appeals board itself and ICC staff, ended the new code, giving objectors no recourse .
Environmental groups and others charge that the board caved to special interests and, in doing so, compromised the board’s reputation as a model code developer. “The International Code Council bent over backwards to accommodate some powerful industries, calling into question the legitimacy of the organization,” said Michael Waite, director of building codes and standards for the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy. in a statement after the council’s decision. .
The board based its determination on the the scope and intent governing the 2024 International Energy Conservation Code (IECC), which prohibits “including measures that do not directly affect the energy conservation of buildings within the basis” of the 2024 code. The council explained that “for jurisdictions looking to incorporate additional greenhouse gas reduction measures, the code will contain new options for electric vehicle charging infrastructure, energy storage systems, electric readiness and demand-sensitive controls”.
The decision by the 18-person board, made up of building officials, also rattled at least two members of the energy conservation code’s residential consensus committee. The committee has 48 members, 16 of whom are building officials. Critics maintain that by accepting appeals challenging the draft mandatory electrical provisions for single-family and up to three-story homes based on the scope and intent of the model code, ICC also overturned the first radically different own implementation: and in itself controversial: the process of updating the energy code.
Under the new rules, government building officials no longer vote to approve or reject the draft model code submitted by the committee. Instead, its members approve the update through a consensus process long used by standards writing groups.
The board “pulled the rug out from under us, after voting members and stakeholders spent thousands of hours over the past three years building consensus and developing a code following the new process,” says committee member Gayathri Vijayakumar of Residential Consensus and Principal Mechanical Engineer at Steven Winter Associates Inc.
Eroded trust
Amy Boyce, fellow committee member and mechanical engineer and senior director of building and energy performance at the Institute for Market Transformation, agrees. “It’s very discouraging to join a process believing that a set of rules apply and find out at the end that they don’t,” he says. “The board has definitely eroded trust between them and the volunteers who developed the code,” adds Boyce. “It will take a lot to regain confidence.”
Boyce and Vijayakumar are upset that, by moving the climate change preparedness provisions to the appendix, the code council board destroyed the carefully crafted omnibus compromise agreement reached by members of the residential consensus committee, some of whom they changed the energy efficiency reduced by the inclusion of electricity. Stop-and-go provisions for electric vehicle charging as a way to break the stalemate between different interests during the early stages of code redevelopment.
The brouhaha began when the board announced its March 18 decision on nine appeals to the draft code filed by gas interests, the Air Conditioning, Heating and Refrigeration Institute and Building Owners and Managers International with the National Multifamily Housing Council.
Scope and intent
The intent of both the commercial and residential provisions is limited to “providing minimum efficiency requirements for buildings that result in the maximum level of energy efficiency that is safe, technologically feasible and cost-effective over the life cycle taking into account economic feasibility, including potential costs and savings to consumers and building owners, and return on investment,” says ICC Pulse, a council newsletter.
Vijayakumar is frustrated that after asking for guidance in 2022 on different interpretations of the scope and intent document, the board directors who wrote it failed to provide “crystal clear guidance.”
“We certainly recognize that people have put a lot of effort into developing the 2024 code, and for things to change is disheartening,” says Ryan M. Colker, the council’s vice president of innovation, in response to the criticism. “We asked for feedback … to improve. the [code development] process prior to the conclusion of appeals, but would welcome continued feedback going forward.”
Inspired to serve the ICC mission
This did not appease Vijayakumar. “Many of us came forward to serve on the committee because we were inspired by ICC’s stated mission in the ICC Energy Framework document “to help our communities increase energy efficiency while also reducing greenhouse emissions to achieve its policy goals,” Vijayakumar wrote in a March 25 letter to Dominic Sims, the council’s director general.
Vijayakumar called for a public apology from the 2024 IECC committee and for the code council board to take responsibility publicly for the “failure to provide clear direction” on the scope and intent of the residential committee when asked in 2022.
Sims responded on April 1, thanking Vijayakumar and the other committee members for their work but not apologizing.
“Council has directed staff, in consultation with council, to clarify the scope and intent of IECC 2027, review and evaluate the appeals process, and suggest adjustments that will make the process more efficient,” he said. write. “We will publish details about the 2027 Development Process when it becomes available.”
Colker attributes the confusion to “different interpretations of scope and intent between the board and staff, and therefore the committee.”
The code increases energy efficiency
There is no doubt that the code would increase energy efficiency over the 2021 code. The 2024 update “is projected to improve energy efficiency by approximately 6.5% for residential buildings and 10% for commercial buildings “, affirms the council. The savings are based on an assessment by the US Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Colker says.
Trouble began two years ago, when the residential committee faced a stalemate. According to Boyce, many proposals that had the required 50% approval at the subcommittee level could not reach the two-thirds threshold required by the full committee. “Instead of accepting the stalemate and releasing a draft with minor updates, committee members worked together to form an omnibus compromise proposal that would be voted on as a package, with gains and concessions on each side,” he explains. Decarbonisation members decided to forgo some stronger efficiency elements” to include electrification measures, Boyce writes on his IMT blog.
The draft residential omnibus was approved with more than 90% approval from the full committee. During the negotiations, the committee was under the impression that all proposals it received, reviewed by the code council, were within the scope and intent of the IECC, based on a council staff memo dated 15 February 2022, by Mike Pfeiffer, then council. senior vice president of technical services and now retired, in response to a request for clarification from the commission sent to the ICC board of directors.
The memo said: “The board has not previously provided updates or clarifications on the scope or intent of codes or standards during an active development process, allowing the development process to be resolved. If an issue is included in the scope or intent statement, may be included in the code base or as an appendix, as determined by the consensus body.
“Any content within the scope and intent of the code may be included in the body of the code as minimum requirements or as an adoptable appendix based on the determination of the responsible consensus committee,” the memo continued.
Other environmental groups are also discouraged. “The setback is very disappointing,” says RMI building electrification expert Jonny Kocher. IECC 2024 “no longer has cities, states and the federal government on track to meet their stated climate goals.”
He adds that the upfront cost to install electric power is $500 to $1,000 per home, according to the California Energy Commission, the New Buildings Institute and consultant Group 14 Engineering. “It would cost several times that to retrofit a house for electric power,” says Kocher. It’s three times more cost-effective to include EV charging readiness in new builds compared to a retrofit, he adds.
“Perhaps most disappointing is the ICC board’s disregard for the high modernization costs they have decided to limit owners and businesses with in the future,” Waite wrote in his ACEEE statement.
Deeply Concerned
RMI organized the statement meeting in reaction to the ICC board’s action. “The New Buildings Institute is deeply concerned by the ICC board’s decision to maintain components of the appeals presented in the 2024 draft IECC to remove key building decarbonisation measures from the model code,” said Ben Rabe, project director of the New Buildings Institute in the statement. “These proven measures are needed to provide jurisdictions with the tools they need to meet their climate goals in the built environment and create climate-resilient communities.”
Jurisdictions that have adopted IECC 2021 contain a total population of 119 million people, as captured by the Census Bureau, ICC says. Additionally, the Federal Emergency Management Agency requires the use of the 2021 codes in any federally funded disaster recovery. And, according to ICC, the US Department of Housing and Urban Development and the US Department of Agriculture are in the process of updating the requirements for funded projects to meet IECC 2021. The US General Services Administration also requires compliance with the 2021 energy code.
Despite the controversy, ICC is maintaining the standards-based approach for the next IECC update. “We will move forward with the standards-based approach only for the IECC,” says the ICC’s Colker, not for any other ICC codes, including the International Construction Code.
