CalGreen: California's Building Code
At the Passive House conference held in Portland, Oregon, last fall, one European Passive House expert stated that the best way globally to reduce humanity’s carbon footprint worldwide is to legislate stricter building codes. That approach has met with success in parts of Europe. Individual and local efforts are all well and good, and should be commended, but states and countries have to step up and make sustainable building mandatory. Here in the United States, we don’t have a national green-building code. There are various local, regional, state, and federal initiatives that encourage or require some degree of sustainable building, but no mandatory national code.
As of January 1, 2011, California requires adherence to the 2010 California Green Building Standards Code, affectionately known as CalGreen. Championed by former Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, CalGreen applies to new residential and commercial construction. It contains a set of mandatory provisions, and two voluntary tiers that can be adopted in whole or in part by local code jurisdictions. The optional tiers are indicators of what will most likely become mandatory measures in future versions of the code.
CalGreen is a separate code body from the current California Energy Code, officially titled 2008 Building Energy Efficiency Standards (commonly referred to as Title 24), but the two are complementary. When CalGreen refers to energy-efficiency matters, it typically does so in terms of Title 24 requirements, and defers to the Energy Efficiency Standards. However, there are specific CalGreen provisions that go above and beyond Title 24 requirements.
The Big Picture
Residential CalGreen, the focus of this article, contains approximately 90 provisions, divided into five categories: Planning and Design, Energy Efficiency, Water Efficiency and Conservation, Material Conservation and Resource Efficiency, and Environmental Quality. Twenty-five of the provisions are mandatory for all new residential construction. The remainder fall into two optional tiers (see Tables 1 and 2). Each tier includes some prerequisites that must be met. Each tier also requires that a project include a certain number of optional provisions. For instance, Planning and Design has two mandatory measures and 14 electives. In order to satisfy that category’s Tier I requirements, you have to meet the mandatory measures and include two optional provisions. The best way to get an understanding of the overall code is to look at Appendix A4 in Section A4.602 of the regulations. It has a concise table of all the requirements, with descriptions noting which are mandatory for each tier.
The tier structure, although useful, is somewhat arbitrary. Local code jurisdictions can require that all projects meet the requirements for one of the tiers (the simplest approach), or they can cherry-pick whatever they want, such as ten items from Tier I and five items from Tier II. They can enact requirements that are even more stringent than CalGreen. There are also provisions for “Innovative Concepts and Local Environmental Conditions” in each category.
Currently, California’s municipalities are reviewing CalGreen and deciding what portions they want to adopt. Clearly, there is a lot of flexibility beyond the basic mandatory measures. Builders, home performance professionals, and energy consultants are worrying that it’s going to be difficult to track what might be wildly varying requirements in each district. The California Energy Commission has stated that it plans on publishing a database of jurisdictional CalGreen variations, but that will probably take some time to develop.
The CalGreen mandatory requirements are, for the most part, straightforward and not too onerous (with a few exceptions). Many of them are already required by local jurisdictions, or reflect industry best practices or just plain common sense. Table 3 is a summary of the mandatory requirements.
In the Planning and Design category, you have to develop a plan to manage storm water drainage during construction