Commercial Building R&D Program Multi-Year Planning: Opportunities and Challenges

John D. Ryan, U.S. Department of Energy
Andrew Nicholls, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

Keywords

Abstract

Commercial buildings use 18% of the United States’ energy and 35% of its electricity, and have commensurate impacts on environmental emissions. The Energy Information Administration’s (EIA) Reference Case projects that this sector’s energy use will grow 1.7%/year through 2025 – a growth rate exceeded only by the transportation sector. Therefore, buildings represent a substantial opportunity for realizing national benefits through energy efficiency, if research and development (R&D) can deliver significant and timely performance and cost breakthroughs.

Formulating an effective R&D portfolio requires effective planning, especially when the approach to energy efficiency moves from the evolutionary to the revolutionary. The central purpose of this paper is threefold: 1) to describe the Department of Energy’s (DOE) commercial buildings R&D scope and the planning context; 2) to summarize some of the fundamental challenges to planning in commercial buildings R&D; and most importantly, 3) to provide an overview of the strategic framework for R&D decision-making that DOE is developing to realize the promise of net zero energy performance in the 2020 to 2025 time frame.

The paper describes progress to date, and remaining work to be done, in developing a persuasive framework for making defensible and transparent decisions about R&D for both new and existing commercial buildings.