I have a short scoop to share with you guys, the latest in the Leslie Knope vs. industry saga long-time subscribers will find familiar. Late Monday night, I got an email from a source working on the next round of national guidelines for homebuilding. Something big had happened.
The gas industry and its allies had tried to torpedo the latest building codes that will require new homes to include the circuitry for electric appliances and car chargers. Doing so might raise the cost of a new house by a few thousand dollars, but it saves homeowners tens of thousands of dollars in renovations to retrofit the wiring.
If you believe electrification is only a passing green fad, this might seem like a needless expense. But if you see the transition away from fossil fuels as a permanent evolution in our built environment, then this is a necessary step to avoid saddling the country with more emissions and property owners with more tedious, costly steps to modernize their real estate.
When the latest codes from the International Code Council reflected the latter assumption, trade associations representing gas utilities and furnace manufacturers filed appeals asking the ICC’s bureaucrats to strip the pro-electrification provisions out of the codebook. The ICC, as you may recall, bent its own rules to allow the industry groups to make their case. Advocates calling for stricter energy-efficiency codes called it a “scandal.”
But the ICC’s appeals board this week rejected all the appeals. The process now goes to the ICC’s board of directors, which will have final say.
The industry groups aren’t giving up. The American Public Gas Association told me it was “disappointed” by the appeals board ruling but vowed to fight on before the board of directors. The Air-Conditioning, Heating, and Refrigeration Institute, a trade group representing furnace makers, said “this issue is, in fact, not concluded.”
The ICC did not respond to my question about when the board of directors last bucked with the recommendations for the appeals panel. But sources familiar with the process told me it would be extremely unusual.
You can read the full story here on HuffPost.