DOE Reopens the Cost-Effectiveness Test for Building Energy Codes, and Commercial Buildings Are in Scope

The Department of Energy published a request for information on May 4, 2026 asking the public how it should measure whether building energy codes are affordable. Comments closed on August 3. The docket number is EERE-2026-BT-BC-0034.

The figures. DOE’s supporting analysis holds that nationwide adoption of the 2024 International Energy Conservation Code would add roughly $14,000 to a typical single-family home, $9.2 billion a year in residential construction costs, and $127 billion cumulatively measured against the 2006 code.

Scope. The notice names two model codes: the IECC, administered by the International Code Council, and ANSI/ASHRAE/IES Standard 90.1. Neither instrument binds anyone by itself. States and local jurisdictions do the adopting. DOE supplies the analysis they cite.

What the current method counts. The RFI describes four metrics DOE relies on. Incremental consumer costs, which the notice footnotes as “first costs” or “upfront costs.” Annual energy cost savings. Payback period, defined as incremental cost divided by annual energy cost savings. And life-cycle cost analysis, “typically over a 30-year period,” treating capital investment as financed through a mortgage. DOE also runs a cash flow analysis to identify “years to positive cash flow, which is of primary interest to households and businesses.”

Nothing in the notice removes utility bill savings from the calculation. The shorthand circulating around this docket is that DOE has stopped counting savings. The primary document does not say so.

Where the questions cluster. The asymmetry sits in what DOE asks for help with. Three of the first topics concern cost: better market cost data than RS Means and retail catalogues, a centralized public cost-estimate database, and better treatment of regional labor and material differences.

On the savings side, the notice takes a different posture. Standardized methods for valuing non-energy benefits such as durability, comfort and disaster resistance “are not well established or accepted across the industry.” National-level analysis using blended average energy prices from the Energy Information Administration “could lead to an overgeneralization of energy cost savings since utility costs vary dramatically across the country.” DOE says it is considering metrics beyond energy cost, site energy and source energy, and plans to add full fuel cycle energy.

Read together, the cost inputs are being sharpened and the savings inputs are being flagged as unreliable. A methodology can shift its conclusions without changing a single equation, purely through which side of the ledger carries the higher evidentiary bar.

Precedent. DOE has run comparable methodology RFIs before, in 2013, 2014 and 2015. What differs here is the premise stated at the outset: building energy codes “have significantly increased the costs of building a home and extended average consumer payback periods.”

The ICC counter-analysis. The International Code Council called DOE’s cost analysis an unsupported assertion and put the omitted benefit at $182 billion in utility bill savings between 2010 and 2040, according to Facilities Dive. That figure came from a DOE web page that is no longer on DOE’s website. ICC also said DOE removed Pacific Northwest National Laboratory analyses showing that utility bill savings consistently offset higher construction costs. RTO Insider published a column on August 16 under the headline “Affordability Wars: Why Chris Wright is Obsessed with Killing Energy-efficient Building Codes.”

Commercial buildings. DOE’s notice defines commercial buildings consistent with Standard 90.1 and the commercial provisions of the IECC: everything except one- and two-family dwellings, townhouses and low-rise multifamily. The published cost figures are residential. The methodology under review is not.

Commercial code stringency is the layer beneath the building performance standards now in force in New York City, Boston and Washington, DC. A weaker federal cost determination gives states a citable basis for holding at an older code cycle, and those performance standards are what convert on-site storage and load management from an optional upgrade into a compliance instrument.

State utility regulators. In the same window that DOE reopened its cost test, state commissions extended theirs. Connecticut’s Public Utilities Regulatory Authority restructured the Energy Storage Solutions program in February 2026, moving all participants enrolling after April 1, 2026 onto a smaller enrollment payment plus ten years of performance payments tied to actual dispatch.

The Public Service Commission of South Carolina approved Duke Energy’s Non-Residential Storage Demand Response Program on May 27, 2026. That program pays a $120 per kilowatt connectivity credit for battery-only systems, rising to $150 per kilowatt when the battery is paired with solar sized at 25% or more of battery output; a $3.50 per kilowatt-month capacity credit adjusted by a utility-calculated capability factor; and $0.10 per kilowatt-hour for energy curtailed during 30 to 36 annual control events of up to four hours. Duke filed the North Carolina version with state regulators on September 15, 2025 at a benefit-cost ratio of 1.12 for Duke Energy Carolinas and 1.20 for Duke Energy Progress.

Those programs pay little at installation and most of their value for measured operation over a decade. The federal code test under review foregrounds first cost and years to positive cash flow. Two arms of energy regulation are applying opposite time horizons to the same building.

That gap is what one recent worked example quantifies. Solar Builder, a trade publication rather than an independent engineering study, puts a 250 kilowatt commercial solar project in Rockford, Illinois at a 4.3-year payback and $215,000 return on its own. Adding a 530 kilowatt battery lifts fifteen-year savings from $216,000 to more than $1 million and internal rate of return from 13% to 21%. The metric that moves most is the one a first-cost screen never reaches.

Where the evidence stops. A request for information is not a rule. DOE has not proposed a revised methodology, and the comment record closed two weeks ago. Two questions decide how far this reaches: whether the revised method treats commercial buildings on the same basis as residential ones, and whether state code bodies adopt ICC’s savings analysis independently of DOE.

DOE’s determination binds no state. It supplies the number states cite, and that number depends on how many years the calculation is permitted to run.

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