City-level legislation
City-level legislation
In March 1993, the city of Berkeley, California passed new legislation that should serve as a model for local policies.
The Commercial Energy Conservation Ordinance (CECO) is based on a similar ordinance that has been in effect since 1989 in San Francisco, Berkeley's neighbor across the Bay. San Francisco is currently the only other city in the world to have this type of legislation. This addition to the Berkeley Municipal Code requires commercial buildings to undergo energy conservation retrofits when the buildings are sold or undergo substantial renovation.
The CECO requires only very basic measures, designed to bring the most inefficient buildings up to some acceptable standard of energy efficiency, not to raise them up to the state of the art. The ordi-nance includes a cost ceiling -1% of the building's sale price or 5% of the cost of the renovation-which limits the required expenditure to a reasonable level.
As with several of the other required measures, the principal lighting requirement is based on the State Building Code requirements, Title 24. Rather than requiring specific technologies, lighting intensity in the building must be reduced to the limit set in the prescriptive requirements in Title 24: 1.5 W/ft^2 (~15 W/m^2) in offices, medical buildings, restaurants and theaters; 1.8 W/ft^2 (~18 W/m^2) in grocery stores and schools; 2.0 W/ft^2 (~20 W/m^2) in places of religious worship, auditoriums, convention centers, and retail stores; and 0.8 W/ft^2 (~8W/m^2) in all other buildings. These limits include credits, in the form of wattage-reduction multipliers, for controls.
However, the State Code is based on new construction-not retrofitting-so its requirements might not be cost effective in a substantial number of retrofit cases. This problem was addressed in San Francisco by setting their standards a little lower: the building can have a 33% higher lighting intensity than the State Building Code requires. Since Berkeley has a much higher prevalence of small businesses, it addressed the problem by defining an alternative compliance method, requiring replacement of all incandescents or halogen lamps with CFLs or other lamps with an efficacy higher than 40 lumens/W. The Berkeley Ordinance authors considered requiring that screw-in CFLs not be used, since they could easily be removed and replaced with incandescents, but this proposal was rejected owing to its poor cost effectiveness.
Many types of lighting are exempt from the requirement, including lighting under occupancy sensor control, task lighting, ornamental lighting, and spotlights and floodlights. Also, an incandescent lamp need not be replaced if it is in use less than 2 hours per day, or less than 6 hours per day if the fixture must be replaced.
CECO illustrates the difficulty of setting a standard for lighting retrofit legislation: measures that may be cost effective in new construction might not be as attractive in retrofit applications; retrofits that can be recommended with confidence might not be able to be universally mandated; retrofits that make sense in one type of building might not be generally applicable enough to require them of all buildings. A retrofit ordinance must meet the lowest common denominator. Therefore, an important aspect of CECO is the educational element in the initial building audit. Additional site-specific retrofit opportunities will be identified in this audit, and their advantages will be discussed.
CECO goes into effect on Earth Day (April 22) 1994, and its success will be reviewed after two years.
Kristin Heinemeier
Berkeley Energy Commission
For further information, contact:
Elaine Eisenstadt
City of Berkeley Energy Office
Tel: +1 510 644 6309