Based upon the works of Delsarte-Goethals-Seidel, Levenshtein, Yudin, and Cohn-Kumar we derive universal lower bounds for the potential energy of spherical codes, that are optimal (in the framework of the standard linear programming approach) over a certain class of polynomial potentials whose degrees are upper bounded via a familiar formula for spherical designs. We classify when improvements are possible employing polynomials of higher degree. Our bounds are universal in the sense of Cohn and Kumar; i.e., they apply whenever the potential is given by an absolutely monotone function of the inner product between pairs of points
