OMB Approves DOE ASHRAE 2016 Determination

Yesterday the OMB’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) announced that they had approved the DOE’s final rule on ASHRAE 2016 Determination. DOE should publish this ‘determination’ in the Federal Register this week.

In an earlier blog post I opined that this may be related to the publication of the  American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) standard on the Facility Smart Grid Information Model (FSGIM; ASHRAE 201-2016). Since this rulemaking is was not included in the latest version of the Unified Agenda, I was looking for a possible explanation for what DOE was doing. Subsequent investigation has shown that I was probably wrong.

It looks like this ‘determination’ is actually related to the DOE’s responsibility under 42 USC 6833(b)(2)(A) to determine if the latest version of ASHRAE Standard 90.1 (in this case the 2016 version) “will improve energy efficiency in commercial buildings”. Last September DOE published their preliminary determination analysis that the 2016 version would improve energy efficiency and requested public comments on their draft report.

Since this final rule almost certainly pertains to energy efficiency not smart grid implementation, I doubt that this rulemaking will have any further mention in this blog.