Green Building Summit: A National Building Code Coming This Year?

When it comes to building codes, the general rule in the U.S. has been to let local and state governments handle it.

The White House and Democrats in Congress, however, are pushing hard for national standards as a way to curb energy consumption. The Senate, in fact, is currently marking up a bill on national building codes, according to Patrick Von Bargen with Quinn Gillespie Associates. (Von Bargen will speak at the Green Building Summit on June 11 in Menlo Park on the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.) The new regulations will likely be voluntary for the first few years.

Improving energy efficiency inside of buildings has become a high priority for the Department of Energy. Operating buildings – keeping on the lights, running the heating system – consumes about 39 percent of the total energy in the U.S. and buildings are notoriously inefficient. Energy secretary Steve Chu has also been one of the leading advocates for improving building efficiency: He ran Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories, perhaps the leading center for building research, before coming to Washington. Some techniques for cutting building power consumption, like replacing existing bulbs with LEDs, can be costly, but others – like better regulating air conditioners or only installing white roofs – can be fairly cheap. If all of the roofs and roads in urban areas were painted with reflective materials (such as white paint) it would it be the equivalent of taking 600 million cars off the road for 18 years .

California, and several organizations, are already pushing for standards that would require new homes built after 2020 to be net-zero energy structures, producing as much energy as they consume, and new commercial buildings to go net zero energy by 2030.

The building code proposals will likely become part of a comprehensive energy bill that will also include a cap and trade system, Von Bargen added. By July, the House will likely pass some form of an energy bill. When it gets to the Senate, President Obama will then use all of the forms of persuasion his office can muster to pass it.

"He will be right there on the steps of the senate asking 'What do we need to change to make this work,' " Von Bargen said. Von Bargen admits he is in the minority, but predicted that a comprehensive energy bill including some form of cap and trade will pass by the end of the year. Others, such as Steve McBee of McBee Strategic Consulting, have said that a bill won't pass in 2009, but will pass before 2010. Others have said it willl be tough to gain the necessary support for any sort of cap and trade plan until a second Obama administration.

Green building codes and other energy efficiency laws, however, could also be segmented out and passed individually.