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“Strengthening building efficiency codes is an essential element of increasing resilience and improving health and safety,” concludes a new report from Just Solutions, a climate organization that works with communities disproportionately impacted by climate change to improve outcomes.
The report, released last month, urges the adoption of the 2021 IECC efficiency standards in new single-family construction, conducting more benefit-cost analyses of investments in building energy efficiency retrofits, increasing the passive survivability of homes, and committing to a holistic approach to resilience to mitigate the impacts of worsening climate extremes. The organization joins a long list of NGOs and for-profit companies, including Zillow, now advocating for increased resiliency in U.S. housing.
Elements of Resiliency
Housing resiliency has multiple dimensions, including enabling communities to maintain essential services such as electricity and being able to shelter in place during power outages. The Just Solutions report highlights the role of building energy efficiency standards in increasing passive survivability and connects building efficiency-related resilience to other necessary elements of resilience. It further calls for a holistic approach to resilience in the context of grid decarbonization.
But what does a holistic approach entail? According to the report, a holistic approach would include enabling multi-day passive survivability, significant investments in distributed zero-emissions resources that provide uninterrupted power to community-determine critical loads and vulnerable populations, community microgrids, and distribution system upgrades to accommodate various aspects of resilience.
The group says that failing to coordinate the various elements of resilience and grid decarbonization will result in increased costs and foregone opportunities, especially as transportation and heating are electrified.
The Benefit of the 2021 IECC
The report highlights an analysis from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) in 2023 DOE that found “adopting the 2021 IECC would approximately double the habitability period for homes during a critical power outage.” Using data from a reference home in Houston, TX, an area impacted by a prolonged ice storm in 2021, DOE used the standard effective temperature (SET), a range of livable temperatures to reach a passive survivability metric in buildings. Then, using modeled scenarios and existing code-built single-family homes, it compared the number of habitable days for those buildings to homes built using the 2021 IECC. This assessment showed that using the more advanced code increased building habitability by as much as 7 days.
Why It Matters
Extreme heat and cold, fires, floods, and droughts have all increased in the past few decades. The Just Solutions report notes that the push for more advanced building codes centered on passive survivability should be a resilience floor. This would enable more significant benefits from other necessary resilience investments, including:
- Maintaining uninterrupted power supply to community-defined critical loads, such as hospitals, emergency response facilities, and public shelters
- Installing sufficient solar-plus storage in affordable housing to power critical loads, including refrigerators, some lights, and medical equipment
- Installing geothermal heating networks for seasonal thermal storage heating in cold areas.
- Promoting community microgrids that can, over time, be expanded to cover a larger percentage of loads as space heating and transportation are electrified, and
- Integrating various elements of energy system resilience, building efficiency standards, and uninterrupted power supply to critical loads during extended outages, with decarbonization planning essential for community health and safety.
Conclusion
While the push to electrify buildings is a necessary endeavor to reduce building carbon emissions, improving building energy efficiency cannot be overlooked. A better thermal envelope is foundational to electrification measures and increased survivability in weather emergencies.
Further, America’s 100 million leaky homes are prime for energy efficiency and electrification upgrades, including air sealing and insulation. Without serious investment to address the retrofit market, the risks to homeowners will only be compounded.