At its May 15 meeting the Quincy City Council passed a resolution asking the mayor to pull together a group to review the city’s current stretch code and assess the benefits and burdens of adopting the state’s new specialized stretch code. This group will include several city departments as well as Shelly Dein, Director of Energy and Sustainability, and nongovernmental people. QCAN hopes to be involved in this group.

The Opt-in Specialized Code provides stricter requirements on the use of gas and fossil fuels for heating and cooking to encourage new construction to go “all-electric.” There will be financial and environmental benefits for residents, public projects, and private projects.

The matter has been referred to the city council’s Environmental & Public Health Committee and Community Engagement Committee. It will be important to let our city councillors know that we are looking forward to making progress on this initiative.

The Stretch Energy Code (Stretch Code) is an additional energy code requirement on top of the Massachusetts “base” Energy Code. The Stretch Code is designed to promote energy efficiency and reduce greenhouse gas emissions in new construction and substantial renovations. The New Buildings Institute describes it as a “locally mandated code or alternative compliance path that is more aggressive than the base code, resulting in buildings that achieve higher energy savings.” One of the benefits they cite is that a Stretch Code can align many of the relevant market actors: “Through making future base code requirements known in advance, it provides tremendous motivation to manufacturers and distributors to compete for future market share of what will ultimately be required products.”

– Keith Johnson, QCAN board member

image: Jacobs School of Engineering, UC San Diego (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)