Rosemarie Bartlett

Understanding Building Energy Codes and Standards

Energy codes and standards play a vital role by setting minimum requirements for energy-efficient design and construction. They outline uniform requirements for new buildings as well as additions and renovations. The Difference Between Energy Codes, Energy Standards and the Model Energy Code Energy codes--specify how buildings must be constructed or perform, and are written in mandatory, enforceable language. States or local governments adopt and enforce energy codes for their jurisdictions. Energy standards--describe how buildings should be constructed to save energy cost-effectively. They are published by national organizations such as the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating, and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE). They are not mandatory, but serve as national recommendations, with some variation for regional climate. States and local governments frequently use energy standards as the technical basis for developing their energy codes. Some energy standards are written in mandatory, enforceable language, making it easy for jurisdictions to incorporate the provisions of the energy standards directly into their laws or regulations.

Cost-Effectiveness and Impact Analysis of Adoption of Standard 90.1-2007 for New York State

This report is a subset of the commercial nationwide building energy code analysis. New York has cost criteria that must also be met, and this report includes those details. This report will be finalized when the nationwide analysis report is finalized in September.

Comparison of Standard 90.1-2007 and the 2009 IECC with Respect to Commercial Buildings

The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Building Energy Codes Program (BECP) has been asked by some states and energy code stakeholders to address the comparability of the 2009 International Energy Conservation Code® (IECC) as applied to commercial buildings and ANSI/ASHRAE/IESNA Standard 90.1-2007 (hereinafter referred to as Standard 90.1-07). An assessment of comparability will help states respond to and implement conditions specified in the State Energy Program (SEP) Formula Grants American Recovery and Reinvestment Act Funding Opportunity, Number DE-FOA-0000052, and eliminate the need for the states individually or collectively to perform comparative studies of the 2009 IECC and Standard 90.1-07. The funding opportunity announcement contains the following conditions: (2) The State, or the applicable units of local government that have authority to adopt building codes, will implement the following: (A) A residential building energy code (or codes) that meets or exceeds the most recent International Energy Conservation Code, or achieves equivalent or greater energy savings. (B) A commercial building energy code (or codes) throughout the State that meets or exceeds the ANSI/ASHRAE/IESNA Standard 90.1-2007, or achieves equivalent or greater energy savings

Assessing overall building energy performance of a large population of residential single-family homes using limited field data

Building energy simulation plays a significant role in building design and retrofit. Most applications deal with individual buildings which allow for the specification of detailed model inputs. However, building energy simulation can be a powerful tool for assessing energy performance even when comprehensive building characteristics are unavailable. In this study, limited field data were collected on randomly selected new homes in eight US states with a goal of evaluating energy code compliance and energy savings potential. The limited data do not allow the derivation of comprehensive model inputs for each individual home sampled, let alone for the entire unknown residential construction stock. Therefore, we used prototype buildings to construct a large number of models and utilized bootstrap sampling to draw inputs from the limited data. This research demonstrates that overall energy performance of a large population of new homes can be assessed by the novel framework, given limited data.

Commercial Building Energy Code Compliance Literature Review

This is a literature review of commercial compliance studies related to building energy codes.

Technical Support Document for Version 3.9.1 of the COMcheck Software

COMcheck provides an optional way to demonstrate compliance with commercial and high-rise residential building energy codes. Commercial buildings include all use groups except single family and multifamily not over three stories in height. COMcheck was originally based on ANSI/ASHRAE/IES Standard 90.1-1989 (Standard 90.1-1989) requirements and is intended for use with various codes based on Standard 90.1, including the Codification of ASHRAE/IES Standard 90.1-1989 (90.1-1989 Code) (ASHRAE 1989a, 1993b) and ASHRAE/IESNA Standard 90.1-1999 (Standard 90.1-1999). This includes jurisdictions that have adopted the 90.1-1989 Code, Standard 90.1-1989, Standard 90.1-1999, or their own code based on one of these. We view Standard 90.1-1989 and the 90.1-1989 Code as having equivalent technical content and have used both as source documents in developing COMcheck. This technical support document (TSD) is designed to explain the technical basis for the COMcheck software as originally developed based on the ANSI/ASHRAE/IES Standard 90.1-1989 (Standard 90.1-1989). Documentation for other national model codes and standards and specific state energy codes supported in COMcheck has been added to this report as appendices. These appendices are intended to provide technical documentation for features specific to the supported codes and for any changes made for state-specific codes that differ from the standard features that support compliance with the national model codes and standards. Beginning with COMcheck version 3.8.0, support for 90.1-1989, 90.1-1999, and the 1998 IECC and version 3.9.0 support for 2000 and 2001 IECC are no longer included, but those sections remain in this document for reference purposes.