On Tuesday, April 28 the Subcommittee on Energy and Environment will
hold a hearing to receive testimony on the role of the Department of
Energy’s research and development programs in developing technologies,
codes, and standards to enable deployment of net-zero energy,
high-performance buildings and support energy efficiency in domestic
industries.
- Steven Chalk, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary, Energy Efficiency
and Renewable Energy, U.S. Department of Energy
- William J. Coad, President, Coad Engineering Enterprises and Chairman,
High-Performance Building Council, National Institute of Building
Sciences
- Paul Cicio, President, Industrial Energy Consumers of America
- Dr. Karen Ehrhardt-Martinez, Research Staff, Economic and Social
Analysis Program, American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy
(ACEEE)
- Dr. J. Michael McQuade, Senior Vice President, Science and Technology,
United Technologies Corporation
Buildings consume more energy than any other sector of the U.S. economy
(40%), including transportation (28%) and industry (32%). From 1980 to
2006, total building energy consumption in the United States increased
more than 46 percent, and is expected to continue to grow at a rate of
more than 1 percent per year over the next two decades. In addition,
almost three-quarters of our nation’s 81 million buildings were built
before 1979. Because buildings are long-lived assets, significant
improvement of their energy efficiency will require either retrofits or
total replacement. Deployment of high performance buildings can reduce
the environmental impact of buildings while making them cheaper to
operate.
Industry accounts for approximately one-third of all energy consumed in
the U.S. with much of that usage concentrated in heavy industries such
as chemical, glass, cement, and metals production, mining, petroleum
refining, food processing, and forest and paper products. These
industries also have relatively high carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions.
Despite their relatively high energy and emissions intensity, many
industrial firms face competitive pressures that make it difficult to
justify the technical and financial risks of R&D projects. Therefore,
federal programs are essential to promote development and deployment of
technologies and process improvements that increase energy efficiency,
raise productivity, reduce and reuse wastes, and trim costs.
Building and Industrial Efficiency Technology Programs at DOE
The importance of energy efficiency and sustainability in the building
and industrial sector has been recognized in various federal laws,
executive orders, and other policy instruments in recent years. Among
these are the energy policy acts (EPAct) of 1992 and 2005 (P.L. 102-486
and P.L. 109-58), the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007
(EISA, P.L. 110-140), and the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of
2009. Through these laws the Department of Energy (DOE) is authorized to
carry out a range of activities to increase energy efficiency in a
number of economic sectors.
Within the DOE Building Technologies Program
both the High-Performance Buildings partnerships and Zero-Net Energy
Commercial Building Initiative, work to improve the efficiency of
buildings and the equipment, components, and systems used to control
temperature, provide lighting, and plumbing.
A high-performance building as defined by EISA
is a building that integrates and optimizes, on a life cycle basis, all
major high performance attributes, including energy conservation,
environment, safety, security, durability, accessibility, cost-benefit,
productivity, sustainability, functionality and operational
considerations. As part of this approach, DOE
selected building industry groups to form a High-Performance Green
Building Consortium that works to accelerate the commercialization of
high-performance building technologies. DOE
and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) also created the
High Performance Buildings Database, which seeks to improve building
performance measuring methods by collecting data on various factors that
affect a building’s performance, such as energy, materials, and land
use. It is a unique central repository of detailed information and data
on high-performance, green building projects across the United States
and abroad.
The Net-Zero Energy Commercial Building Initiative aims to realize
marketable net-zero energy commercial buildings by 2025. In general, a
net-zero energy building produces as much energy as it uses over the
course of a year. The program brings architects, engineers, builders,
contractors, owners, and occupants together to optimize building
performance, comfort, and savings through a whole-building approach to
design and construction. The program is divided into three interrelated
strategic areas designed to overcome technical and market barriers:
research and development, equipment standards and analysis, and
technology validation and market introduction. Key research areas
include: commercial lighting solutions; indoor environmental quality;
building controls and diagnostics; and space conditioning.
The Department also participates in a variety of activities to aid in
standards and codes development for new building technologies,
appliances, and compliance and design tools. For example the Building
Technologies Program’s Building Energy Codes initiative works with the
National Institute of Standards and Technology, state and local
governments, national codes organizations, and industries to help
develop improved national model energy codes. Unlike conventional
building codes which dictate only minimum requirements for construction,
“model” building codes are designed to push the technological envelope
of what can be achieved in building design, construction and operation.
Ultimately, there may need to be a comprehensive and unified framework
of standards which accounts for the full range of metrics and benchmarks
to maximize building performance. DOE also
updates and improves appliances and equipment standards by testing
products and technologies, and ultimately conducting rulemaking through
a public process.
The DOE Industrial Technologies Program (ITP)
seeks to reduce manufacturing energy intensity and carbon emissions
through coordinated research and development with industry, deployment
of innovative energy efficient technologies, by providing energy
assessments of industrial facilities, and through dissemination of
industry best practices. The ITP invests in
high-risk, high-value cost-shared R&D projects to reduce industrial
energy use and process waste streams, while stimulating productivity and
growth. Projects may be specific to a certain industry (ex: aluminum
smelting), or applicable across a range of industrial applications (ex:
fuel and feedstock flexibility). In addition, the
ITP serves as an informational resource by
making available information on other financial assistance and research
opportunities, background on both existing and emerging technologies, as
well as results of case studies from past ITP
projects. The ITP also sponsors 26
University-Based Industrial Assessment Centers (IACs) that provide
no-cost energy assessments primarily to small- and medium-sized
manufacturers. By operating through university engineering programs the
IACs serve as a training ground for the next-generation of energy and
industrial engineers.
Pushing the Energy Efficiency Envelope
While these programs continue to demonstrate success in developing
technologies and practices for high-performance buildings and
sustainable industries, advancing the state of technology far beyond
what is currently available will require the programs to incorporate
entirely new technologies and approaches into their R&D agendas.
For instance, buildings of the future will be designed to operate as a
singular system of interoperable components – a concept that is not
possible today. A typical building is comprised of a complex array of
components (wood, metals, glass, concrete, coatings, flooring, sheet
rock, insulation, etc.) and subsystems (lighting, heating, ventilation
and air conditioning, appliances, landscape maintenance, IT equipment,
electrical grid connection, etc.) all of which are developed
individually by independent firms that do not often design and test
their performance in conjunction with other components and systems. Even
after building completion, systems are rarely optimized together to
improve overall energy efficiency and environmental performance. The
inefficiencies attributable to this fragmentation of the building
components and systems, and the lack of monitoring and verification of a
building performance, point to a critical need for a more integrated
approach to building design, operation, and technology development. An
approach that couples buildings sciences, architecture, and information
technologies could lead to entirely new “self-tuning” buildings with
subsystems that are able to continuously communicate with each other and
respond to a range of factors. Wide-scale deployment of these types of
net-zero energy high performance buildings will likely require federal
programs to play a larger coordinating role in the development of the
common technologies, codes, and standards.
Pushing the efficiency envelope will also require engaging the social
sciences in providing a much greater understanding of how people and
organizations make energy-related decisions. Individual and collective
behavior plays a critical role in efficiency, not only through direct
demand for energy, but also by creating or failing to create market
demand for more energy efficient technologies. Consumers make these
decisions every day when weighing options such as what vehicle or
appliance to purchase, whether to drive or take public transportation,
what light bulbs to install, or whether to shut down their computers at
night. In aggregate these decisions have an impact on the supply and
demand curves that drive both energy prices and, ultimately, energy
technology development.
In 2005, the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) produced a report on
“Decision Making for the Environment: Social and Behavioral Science
Research Priorities.” In the chapter on Environmentally Significant
Individual Behavior, the NAS panel states: “A
basic understanding of how information, incentives, and various kinds of
constraints and opportunities, in combination with individuals’ values,
beliefs, and social contexts, shape consumer choice in complex
real-world contexts would provide an essential knowledge base for
understanding, anticipating, and developing policies for affecting
environmentally significant consumer behavior.” Integrating social
science research into the larger energy R&D field will provide greater
insight into the best ways to convey information to consumers and help
them make decisions regarding energy efficiency and conservation. For
instance, understanding consumer behavior will help in development of a
whole building approach to design and operation of building systems,
where components are integrated to reduce energy consumption through
displaying information to occupants.
House Science, Space, and Technology Committee
Energy Subcommittee
2318 Rayburn
04/28/2009 at 10:00AM