RESIDENTIAL AND LOW INCOME SECTION 2 – PAGE 15
In July 2008, California’s Building Standards
Commission (BSC) adopted a first-ever set of
Green Building Standards that apply to
commercial and residential construction
statewide.
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The standards will take effect on a
voluntary basis in 2009, and will likely be
adopted as mandatory standards by 2012. In
addition, in August, the City and County of San
Francisco adopted a Green Building ordinance
requiring newly constructed commercial
buildings over 5,000 sq ft, residential buildings
over 75 feet in height, and renovations on
buildings over 25,000 sq ft to meet the United
States Green Building Council’s Leadership in
Energy and Environmental Design standards
(LEED) and other green building certifications.
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Similarly, the City of Los Angeles enacted its
own Green Building Ordinance in April 2008,
which takes affect later in 2008 and 2009. It
establishes a series of requirements and
incentives for developers to meet LEED
standards and is expected to affect at least 7.5
million square feet each year.
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The emergence of sustainable building policies
and ordinances are an indication that many local
governments desire building practices that go
beyond State minimum building codes. As more
local governments enact codes that are more
stringent than State codes, a patchwork of
different and potentially conflicting building
requirements is arising. As requirements
become more varied across geography,
developers and particularly production home
builders may have difficulty designing and
building major developments consistent with
both State and local codes.
Accordingly, Strategy 2 requires coordination of
local government building codes and
development policies to facilitate common
approaches to the adoption and rapid evolution
of highly energy efficient technologies and
techniques in new construction statewide.
Coordination also will advance testing of
sustainable building technologies and
techniques in different operating environments
to provide a stronger basis for progressive
increases in the stringency and coverage of
energy efficiency standards within State building
codes.
The Energy Commission is the logical candidate
to lead the codes and standards effort along with
the BSC and the Department of Housing and
Community Development. Near-term, the
Energy Commission could collaborate with these
agencies to publish a provisional, performance-
based “reach code” reference standard for
“beyond code” residential construction in
California. This would be advisory and create a
reference from which to gauge further
improvements.
The process could coordinate with the Energy
Commission’s Public Interest Energy Research
(PIER) and other research organizations
(Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL),
National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL),
Building Industry Research Alliance (BIRA) to
assess and provide the foundation for
recommendations, including monitoring and
measurement approaches.
This Goal also requires a major transformation
in the construction, design and usage of
residences through a combination of mandates
and voluntary actions. The technical feasibility
of ZNE homes is in early stages of
demonstration through the pioneering efforts of
the Sacramento Municipal Utility District
(SMUD), NREL, and home designers and
builders. DOE’s Building America effort, for
instance, has put ZNE research to work in
homes across 34 states. These demonstrations
also provide a forum for continual research on
optimizing performance of homes with ZNE
elements.
Several ZNE residential projects, such as
SMUD’s project in Roseville, CA, are already
underway and others are in the planning or
conceptual phase. In the near term, the utilities
will aggressively promote additional proof of
concept pilots, including affordable housing
elements in these pilots.
Significant additional resources will be required
to scale these efforts up to for full-scale
production and sale at affordable prices. In an
effort to marshal private, public, academic,
corporate, and entrepreneurial resources
towards this objective, a prominent philanthropy
organization will soon announce an Energy Free
Home Challenge: to achieve net zero energy at
net zero cost. Launching in fall 2008, the prize
will award $20 million in cash prizes both for
enabling technology innovation and whole-home
innovation.