A New Strategy from the Building Codes Assistance Project

More and more, organizations and businesses are discovering they can play a key role in achieving energy savings through state and local level policy advocacy of building codes. To assist such cross-sector efforts, the Building Codes Assistance Project (BCAP) has launched a new campaign called the Fifty State Strategy that aims to manage the opportunity as well as the resources for best practices on policy and implementation.

Setting a new baseline

Based on the fundamental belief that all states can achieve greater energy efficiency through building codes, BCAP's Fifty State Strategy dictates that the level of efficiency in the national model energy code should be the minimum baseline in every state. For some, the goal of catching up to the current model code will be a stretch, so one of the campaign's priorities is to create a working plan for those states lagging behind the national code. In addition, the Fifty State Strategy will address best practices on policy and implementation that even leading states can use to improve their codes.

Expanding partnerships and resources

BCAP is working with partners to develop individual State Plans that identify the code opportunity in every state and, in partnership with the Responsible Energy Codes Alliance (RECA), facilitate improved collaboration and track progress across the country. To capture the opportunities identified in the State Plans, BCAP is developing a series of State Toolkits, which expand and reinvent BCAP’s existing state pages. The Toolkits will not only have code status, process and history, but will also identify main players within each state, “above-code” activity, and the main drivers for states to pursue energy savings through codes.

BCAP will be working closely with regional energy efficiency organizations, environmental groups, industry and others looking for opportunities to participate in state code advocacy efforts. For more information, visit http://www.bcap-energy.org/ or contact Aleisha Khan at akhan@ase.org.