The second quarter of 2022 was yet another busy time for NEEA’s Codes and Standards team. Code development efforts at both the state and national scale kept the team busy while product efficiency standard rulemakings continued to pour in from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE).
Of note, Washington State closed its residential code proposal submission timeline in Q2 2022, while the Energy Code Technical Advisory Group convened to discuss the proposals.
Montana adopted the 2021 International Energy Conservation Code (IECC) with a few modifications and the code went into effect in June 2022. This was a quick update since Montana had adopted the IECC 2018 code in February 2021.
The 2024 IECC development process continued in Q2 2022. Over 400 code change proposals were submitted for this code development cycle and the Residential and Commercial IECC committees (and their related subcommittees) completed their first rounds of reviews of these proposals.
For the first time in more than 25 years, U.S. DOE updated the energy standard for manufactured homes. NEEA and other Northwest and national advocates provided much of the data that showed U.S. DOE the benefits of updating the standard. The standard went into effect August 1, 2022 with compliance required May 31, 2023. While the standard does not require many improvements to the efficiency of single-wide homes, it does require significant improvements to double-wide and larger homes.
