by Brianna Crandall — March 21, 2014—Representatives from across the building industry, including code officials, building owners, manufacturers, designers and energy efficiency advocates, have come together under the leadership of the nonprofit National Institute of Building Sciences to develop a new approach to meeting energy efficiency requirements in the most cost-effective and reality-based manner, by focusing specifically on the actual energy used in the building. The Congress-authorized Institute serves as an interface between government and the private sector to improve the built environment.
This “Outcome-based Pathway,” which the group submitted as a proposed code change to the International Green Construction Code (IgCC), appears in the monograph of IgCC proposed changes that the International Code Council released on March 15 for public review. The Institute highlighted the idea for the “Outcome-Based Pathway” in its 2010 Moving Forward annual report to the U.S. president.
“The building community needs a better baseline of actual building performance against which to measure progress. More importantly, the application and use of prescriptive criteria must be eliminated in favor of stated performance goals or expected outcomes (although, after setting those goals or outcomes, prescriptive guidance to achieve them can be developed),” reads the Moving Forward report.
The industry group specifically focused on an outcome-based approach to address a number of challenges facing the building industry:
- Code departments have limited resources available to enforce building codes (particularly energy codes, which are not usually seen as a life safety issue).
- Energy use is highly measurable, yet current code pathways anticipate results from designs; they do not assess actual building performance.
- Designers do not have the flexibility to use some of the latest technologies or practices to achieve energy efficiency requirements.
- Not all energy-saving strategies, such as building orientation, are effectively captured in codes.
- Energy efficiency goals increasingly rely on reductions in energy use at the systems level, but the IECC has primarily focused on a component approach.
- A growing percentage of energy uses associated with buildings are not currently covered within the existing code framework (i.e., plug loads).
In addition to the National Institute of Building Sciences, a number of organizations, including the New Buildings Institute, The Institute for Market Transformation, and the Colorado Chapter of the International Code Council, support the proposal. The performance-based approach “complements the efforts underway by more and more cities and states to implement building energy performance benchmarking and disclosure laws,” said Cliff Majersik, executive director of the Institute for Market Transformation.
“A new compliance path based on targeted energy outcomes in the IgCC would represent a transformative change in the building industry that may be as significant as the advent of energy codes more than 35 years ago,” said Ralph DiNola, executive director of the New Buildings Institute. “This evolution to outcome-based performance requirements recognizes that prescriptive and modeled design approaches are often not representative of the actual energy outcomes of buildings, and that current codes fail to regulate some of the most significant energy end uses in buildings today. NBI is excited to partner with NIBS in this effort.”
The proposed code change will be heard by the IgCC Energy/Water Committee during the International Code Council’s Committee Action Hearings April 27 through May 4 in Tennessee. View the proposal, a section-by-section summary and reasoning statement on the Institute Web site.
