All I want for Christmas...(& for California's building community)

This year we've seen a tidal shift towards building electrification and California's advocacy community has been leading this impressive charge. This has been so exciting to witness and I've been buoyed by the sea-change. But anyone working on electrification and building decarbonization has likely discovered how hard it is to actually specify, purchase and install many of the products we need to implement local electrification and decarbonization ordinances. Why is this? Why are heat-pump water heaters not easy to source and why is it even harder to find tradespeople willing to install them...?

I've long bemoaned the fact that California's building materials marketplace has been missing out on many high performance products - particularly products used by front-runner professionals like me and my Passive House community colleagues. Hearing me rant about California's 'third-world product supply chain' has sounded shocking to those who don't work or travel to other markets as often as I do, and despite it being an unpopular stance, I've pointed out that our legendary energy code is (albeit inadvertently) at the root of why we cannot source cutting edge products for our buildings here in California. Here's a real world story for you, direct from the trenches:

I'm currently working on a new single family project in Sacramento. My clients and I are targeting Certified Passive House and have added low embodied carbon as an additional goal. We wanted to install these lovely Passive House certified wood windows, which are now locally made in Kansas. Unfortunately, because this small, U.S. producer can't yet afford to pay for National Fenestration Rating Council (NFRC) certification, on top of the PHI certification he already obtained, we can't use them. Why? Because they blow up my Title-24 energy code compliance report and push this project out of compliance. Despite the fact that these windows perform way better than almost every other clad wood window in California, we are being prevented from installing them in this project because we are forced to take the worst possible performance rating (a default rating) by our Title-24 energy code's modeling process. This makes no sense.

I should backtrack here to explain that I do believe that NFRC certification is mostly a good thing. It was initiated to support better performance transparency for fenestration products so we have a system that impartially assess window efficiency. However, it doesn't work well for small, local producers willing to bring innovation to our marketplace. NFRC certification is complicated to navigate and costly. (I know this from personal experience trying to navigate NFRC certification for two German window manufacturers whom I represented during the last recession.) NFRC certification does a great job at stopping terrible products from being sold and installed in California, but it simultaneously prevents innovative high performance products - especially those made by smaller companies - from reaching California's market.

How do we fix this?

Before we get to solutions, it's important to note that this phenomena is not limited to window products. The influx of many other products, such as innovative heat pumps, small ventilation systems, wall systems, insulation systems and products that combine multiple functions have been slow to reach our markets. Last week I met a hydronic heat pump equipment vendor who shared the challenges he's having with importing a new product to our market because of barriers imposed by UL listing regulations. For the past twenty years I've witnessed innovative products come to California (anyone else remember mushroom insulation) and die a slow death of attrition. While this may not all be directly attributable to this quirk in our otherwise exemplary energy code, we clearly don't have a well-greased pathway for innovative high performance products can be safely tested and adopted by our massive Californian marketplace.

This is where the solution comes in...! California needs a well-vetted, well-established high performance pathway that already offers certification but only for high performance outcomes, like Passive House. By using an established high bar standard, new products can come to the Californian market in a way that removes the constraints currently aimed primarily at keeping the worst products out of California.

How can we do this? Three other states - Massachusetts, Washington State and New York (and all of Canada) - have already included Passive House certification as an alternate compliance pathway in their energy codes. This allows project teams to specify vetted high performance products and no longer be constrained by limits such as NFRC or UL listing. Projects will still be subject to rigorous energy modeling and onsite quality assurance and verification testing - all of which is managed by third-party certifiers. A project compliance process that mirrors California's CalCerts program could very easily be established so that the data from these projects could be captured and used to provide and support cost-effective measures in future code cycles.

This is why all I want for Christmas is for California to simply follow MA, WA and NY, and add a high performance 'secret door' to finally allow already vetted high performance products like these (and many more just like them) to thrive here in California. 

Bronwyn

If you want to read about other policy initiatives, letters and advocacy I've collaborated on in 2022, check out this PHN Policies that Moved Passive House recap here. Onwards!