New International Green Construction Code Could Raise the Bar on Building Efficiency

April 5, 2012
The attention on energy-efficient lighting, more advanced building controls and other green technologies now stand to see an additional boost from building codes that, if widely adopted, could help shift people’s basic expectations further toward the green.

The growth in green building has been a bright spot for the electrical industry during the recession and sluggish recovery of the past few years. The attention on energy-efficient lighting, more advanced building controls and other green technologies now stand to see an additional boost from building codes that, if widely adopted, could help shift people’s basic expectations further toward the green.

Last month, the International Code Council, Washington, D.C., an organization created by building inspectors and code officials to create unified, nationwide model codes for building safety and performance (it now includes architects, engineers, builders, contractors, government officials and manufacturers among its membership), released the second public version of its International Green Construction Code (IgCC).

The IgCC has been heralded as a potential game-changer in the environmental community and the construction industry. It’s poised to shift the regulatory focus away from the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) program that has dominated the green construction conversation since it was established a dozen years ago. This is by design, as the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC), which created and administers LEED, had a hand in the IgCC’s creation.

The path that led to the IgCC began with a conversation between officials from USGBC and the American Society of Heating, Refrigeration and Air-conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) in 2005. USGBC had been in existence just five years at that point, but already had begun to see its LEED voluntary rating and certification program used by local building officials to create new building codes and policies.

“Over the first five years after LEED was introduced, we started to see policy makers set up quasi-regulatory frameworks based on LEED,” says Brendan Owens, USGBC’s V.P. of LEED, who was part of that original conversation. “Some of those efforts were effective, and at first most of them were incentive-based. But then a couple of people said, ‘We’re going to turn it into a code,’ and they forced it into a regulatory framework. LEED wasn’t built to be a code, and it doesn’t perform particularly well when used that way.”

USGBC approached ASHRAE at the Greenbuild conference in Atlanta that year seeking insight from an organization with a long history of writing standards. It turned out ASHRAE had been having similar conversations with the Illuminating Engineering Society (IES). That was the start of the initiative that created ASHRAE Standard 189.1 “Standard for the Design of High-Performance, Green Buildings Except Low-Rise Residential Buildings.”

The IgCC is a model code based on ASHRAE 189.1, which in turn was created to specify the details of design and construction beyond the base-level, widely adopted energy codes and standards, the International Energy Conservation Code (IECC) and ASHRAE 90.1.

IgCC creates a regulatory framework for new and existing buildings, establishing minimum green requirements that local and state governments can adopt or modify as they choose. Maryland, Rhode Island, Oregon, Florida, Illinois and various local jurisdictions throughout the United States have adopted IgCC as an optional building code or as a requirement for special green development areas. (Other states have mostly adopted the baseline IECC and ASHRAE 90.1.)

IgCC programs are often paired with incentives for achieving documented levels of energy-efficiency, renewable energy production, water use reduction, waste control and siting to minimize environmental impact. Some of the incentives come in the form of tax abatement, reimbursement of certification costs, income tax credits, utility rate reductions, permit variances and expedited permitting. In some jurisdictions, new buildings that qualify receive incentives while new buildings that don’t gain enough points pay a penalty.

USGBC’s 80 local chapters take the lead in local advocacy, and will be promoting the use of IgCC in their cities and states. The group’s hope is that widespread adoption of the IgCC would establish energy efficiency and environmental performance levels that once seemed extreme as the new mainstream building practice. What was the ceiling becomes the new floor, as Owens puts it.

In some contexts, IgCC is considered “Beyond Code” in that it goes well beyond the IECC and ASHRAE 90.1. But the real goal of many of the organizations in the green construction movement is to make net zero energy buildings the norm. Actually, there’s widespread belief among the green building faithful that building practices can be moved beyond even the net zero level to where buildings become net positive contributors to the well-being of their occupants, their communities and the surrounding environment.