International Cooperation to Scale Up Adoption of High-Performance Buildings: From Novel to Normal

Panel: Commercial Buildings: Program Design, Implementation, and Evaluation

Authors:
Laura Van Wie McGrory, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Mark Ginsberg, U.S. Department of Energy
Joe Huang, White Box Technologies

Abstract

The seven partner countries of the Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate (APP)-Australia, Canada, China, India, Japan, Korea, and the United States-are collaborating on a variety of projects to enhance their energy security and mitigate climate change. Among the goals of the Buildings and Appliances Task Force (one of the partnership's eight task forces) is to increase the percentage of high-performance buildings in the building stock of the APP countries. The project partners have agreed to build or enhance individual demonstration buildings, and also have developed a multi-pronged strategy to accelerate the wider uptake of advanced building technologies and practices throughout the APP economies: sharing information and experience; developing and disseminating tools; working on nationalscale implementation in selected countries' commercial building sectors; and promoting the project's activities to a wider audience of buildings professionals. The main challenge in this collaboration has been aligning the partner countries' priorities and available resources to enable truly multilateral initiatives and consistent participation by key players. However, the APP partnership has provided a valuable mechanism for cooperation on high-performance buildings that has yielded promising results in its first two years. These successes will likely be enhanced by linking the APP activities to the burgeoning number of national initiatives to promote highperformance buildings in the APP partner countries.