Indio commission briefed on new sustainable building standards

The Indio Sustainability Commission on Monday learned more about California’s evolving building decarbonization policies and the options available to the city to adopt measures that could affect how residents heat and cool their homes and what appliances they use.

For most Indio residents, the changes are not yet mandatory, but state policies are moving in that direction — and the city has the option to accelerate the timeline by adopting local requirements that go beyond what the state already mandates.

Lawrence Garber, interim associate director of policy acceleration at the Building Decarbonization Coalition, said new state energy codes that took effect Jan. 6 strongly encourage heat pumps for space and water heating in new construction.

Heat pumps serve as a dual-purpose alternative to traditional air conditioners and furnaces by moving heat rather than generating it through combustion. During the summer months, the system moves heat from inside a home and venting it outdoors to keep interiors cool. In the winter, the process reverses as the unit pulls ambient heat from the outside air—even in chilly temperatures—and transfers it indoors to provide warmth.

“The requirements that are in place, the majority of them, focus on new construction,” Garber said.

For some existing commercial buildings, a new state requirement mandates that certain rooftop heating and cooling units be replaced with heat pumps when they break down, rather than with fossil fuel equipment.

Garber said 13 California cities have already adopted policies that encourages homeowners to install heat pumps when replacing or adding air conditioning units, and that Indio could choose to adopt a similar measure.

He also described a neighborhood-scale approach that would coordinate the transition of entire blocks of buildings off natural gas, potentially allowing utilities to decommission gas pipelines as they near the end of their useful life.

For individual homeowners struggling with the cost of electrification, Garber said there are some options.

“When there is an upfront cost difference between the electric heat pump versus the gas alternative, particularly for low income families, it will behoove us to be designing utility and government programs to support to support that transition,” Garber said. He said a pilot program called Equitable Building Decarbonization Program will soon be rolled out from the California Energy Commission.

One commissioner raised concerns about where the state would obtain the additional electricity needed to power an all-electric building stock.

Garber acknowledged the challenge, and called the build out of clean electric energy “one of the challenges of our time” adding, “It would be better to put our scarce investment dollars, investing in our clean electric side of the system than it would be to maintain the fossil gas system in parallel with the electric system.”

Because the commission was only hearing a presentation, there was no action taken.

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