2022 Nonresidential And Multifamily Alternative Calculation Method Reference Manual: For the 2022 Building Energy Efficiency Standards Title 24, Part 6, and Associated Administrative Regulations in Part 1.

The California Energy Commission’s (CEC) 2022 Building Energy Efficiency Standards for residential and nonresidential buildings allow compliance by either a prescriptive or performance method. The performance compliance approach uses computer modeling software to trade off efficiency measures. Performance compliance is the most popular compliance method because of the flexibility it provides in building design.

Compliance software must be certified by the CEC, following rules established for modeling software. This document establishes the rules for creating a building model, describing how the proposed design is defined, explaining how the standard design is established, and reporting on the Performance Compliance Certificate. This document also describes the procedure for performance calculation, necessary rule sets, reference method for testing compliance software accuracy, and the minimum reporting requirements. The CEC reserves the right to approve vendor software for limited implementations of what is documented in this manual.

This Nonresidential and Multifamily Alternative Calculation Method Reference Manual explains how the proposed and standard designs are determined. The explanation for single-family building proposed and standard designs are described in the Single-Family Residential Alternative Calculation Method Reference Manual.

The public domain compliance software provided by the CEC is called California Building Energy Code Compliance (CBECC). CBECC and all third-party software must meet rules described in the Nonresidential and Multifamily Buildings ACM Reference Manual.