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Notes -
Culture war in building codes?
In most of the United States, the building codes are based on codes issued by the ICC (International Code Council), including the IECC (International Energy Conservation Code). Apparently, the committee in charge of updating the IECC for 2024 attempted to insert a bunch of mandatory provisions that were not directly related to energy conservation. The NAHB (National Association of Homebuilders) summarizes the objectionable provisions as follows:
Electric-vehicle charging infrastructure in both residential and commercial buildings
Solar-readiness provisions in residential buildings
Electric-readiness provisions for electric cooking, clothes drying, and water heating
Penalty for using natural gas for space or water heating in commercial buildings
Electrical energy storage system readiness in commercial buildings
These insertions were appealed to the ICC's board of directors, which (by votes of at least 10 to 7) ordered that they be moved to nonmandatory appendices of the code.
Codes and code enforcement have always be and will always be instruments of politics. The devil is always in the details. That said:
While I probably wouldn't want it to be mandatory, in that I'd like very little to be mandatory, I've been yelling at every meeting for every project I work on that we're idiots if we don't plan for EVs. If you put in a parking lot today without running conduit under it for future chargers, you're a fool who will later be ripping up a parking lot. The cost of planning for the future should be minimal, requiring that commercial and residential buildings leave breaker space and place conduit before the building is closed up is smart. It avoids costly and often messy retrofitting later. Requiring them to actually put in the wiring and devices I would oppose.
Greenfielding new commercial construction? Absolutely, put it in now. Back in the 80s, a family member's residential construction business put in a fiber network for the power company in a front range city, and the one-time installation cost has paid for itself about a thousand times over, even allowing for updated runs and municipal gigabit fiber to the home in that neighborhood. Smart infrastructure investment is usually a good deal, even if it's pricey up front.
Just don't make me re-wire my entire panel box for solar/battery/EV deployment, when I have none of those things, just to finish my damn basement.
I’ll agree to a point, but I think for a lot of people looking to build for business this could easily end up making it cheaper and faster to find places that don’t mandate those future ready things. That’s cost disease in a nutshell. I don’t have the money to lay that cable under my parking lot to maybe possibly use it five years later. And if the barriers are high, I might well end up either just not building at all and taking my business elsewhere. Which ultimately reduces jobs in the area, tax receipts, and just general quality of life for residents who have to either pay the premium to shop locally in places that bent the knee and need to recoup the costs of charging stations for cars that nobody owns, or drive their gas powered cars an extra twenty miles to the next town where they can save cash on goods they need.
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