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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.
Like I said, the devil is in the details. What constitutes "readiness?" I'm all for conduit and panel space, very much against ripping out existing anything.
Tons of the ticky tacky national builders give their customers panels that are already completely maxed out, such that in order to add an outlet without breaking code requirements you have to redo the entire box. It's smart to avoid that. Running heavy conduit up to the roof and out to the garage before you close the walls is trivial, after it's major surgery. That's smart policy. Putting thousands of dollars in wiring in is a mistake.
Even for conduit, the software concept of You Ain't Gonna Need It probably applies at scale -- depends on your assumptions as to adoption of course, but I'll be that the total cost of putting this everywhere is around the same OOM as the extra cost that would have been incurred by (say) spec-home buyers who end up using it.
Sort of a form of income transfer from low-end homebuyers who really want a low-end home to midrange folks who do end up upgrading things later.
This has always been a far too broad reactionary argument to tamper a tendency that goes too far. The wise engineer knows that there is a very small target of just enough helping yourself in the future without hindering yourself in the present. And I've only seen people develop a good sense of it through experience.
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At some point it gets complicated and we can split hairs. Are unit prices elastic to cost or primarily to demand? For the most part low end home buyers aren't actually checking things like electrical wiring, they're paying for ft^2 and location.
But the cost of putting conduit in a wall or under a parking lot is negligible. In any house I've renovated, I always run conduit between the major parts of the house, so as to at least be able to run a wire most of the way without cutting open any walls. Panel to the garage, panel to the attic, panel to the basement.
And the vast majority of them will never need that conduit -- so instead of just paying for sq. ft. and location, now they are paying also for the conduit that guys like you and @IGI-111 (and probably me, TBF) want. The builder doesn't put that stuff there for free.
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