ASHRAE Seeks Second Round of Public Comments for Proposed Revision to Standard on Residential Building Energy Design

ASHRAE seeks a second round of public comments on proposed revisions to BSR/ASHRAE/IES Standard 90.2-2007R – Energy-Efficient Design of Low-Rise Residential Buildings. The standard is open for a 45 day public review until June 18. Those interested in reviewing and commenting can do so at www.ashrae.org/technical-resources/standards-and-guidelines/standards-actions. The purpose of Standard 90.2-2007R is to provide minimum energy-efficiency requirements for the design and construction of residential buildings. The proposed revision of ASHRAE Standard 90.2 presents a completely new approach to delivered residential building energy performance than the 2007 edition of the Standard. This revision to the standard seeks to deliver residential building energy performance that is at least 50% more efficient than the energy efficiency defined by the 2006 International Energy Conservation Code (IECC), which serves as the industry benchmark. “The key to accomplishing residential building energy performance is in the delivery of an accurate, flexible, performance-based standard to enable user creativity in meeting the performance objectives,” says Theresa Weston, Ph.D., chair of the Standard 90.2 committee. “More importantly, this Standard provides a mechanism by which any residential building design can be easily evaluated against these performance objectives.By establishing a clearly‐defined rules set for energy performance modeling, users such as home builders, can easily assess various designs, material options, orientations and other variables to evaluate predicted energy performance. This second round of public review presents proposed independent substantive changes to the previous public review draft completed in December 2016. The standard focuses on “performance” as the primary objective and also includes some system level minimum prescriptive provisions of performance. These minimum provisions are provided to ensure compliance and to protect against analytical gaming. The Standard 90.2 committee will begin reviewing comments at the 2018 ASHRAE Annual Conference in Houston on Monday, June 25 and Tuesday, June 26. Interested parties are welcome to observe. To make a comment or learn more, please visit www.ashrae.org/publicreviews.