Assessment of Impacts from Updating Iowa's Residential Energy Code to Comply with the 2003 International Energy Conservation Code.

The state of Iowa currently requires that new buildings comply with the Council of American Building Officials? (CABO) 1992 Model Energy Code (MEC) (CABO 1992). CABO has been transformed into the International Code Council (ICC) and the MEC has been renamed the International Energy Conservation Code (IECC). The most recent edition of the code is the 2003 IECC (ICC 2003). Iowa?s Department of Natural Resources requested that the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) compare the 1992 MEC with the 2003 IECC to estimate impacts from updating Iowa?s residential energy code to comply with the new code. Under DOE's direction, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) completed an assessment of the impacts from this potential code upgrade, including impacts on construction and energy consumption costs. This report is an update to a similar report completed by PNNL in 2002 (Lucas 2002) that compared the 1992 MEC to the 2000 IECC.