DOE, GSA issue RFI for technologies to reduce carbon emissions in buildings

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and the General Services Administration (GSA) issued a request for information (RFI) for technologies that reduce greenhouse gas emissions from commercial buildings.

The joint RFI, Technologies for Net-Zero Carbon Buildings, aims to support technologies and solutions  ready for evaluation in occupied, operational buildings. Commercial buildings generate about 16 percent of all U.S. carbon dioxide emissions, according to the DOE. This effort supports the DOE’s goal to achieve net-zero emissions economy-wide by 2050,

“Our mission is to support the widespread deployment of technologies that will decarbonize U.S. commercial buildings,” Wale Odukomaiya, RFI technology lead and National Renewable Energy Lab (NREL) research engineer in the Building Technologies and Science Center, said. “In a nutshell, we’re looking for innovations that are in the early phase of commercialization to support their launch into the next phase of market adoption through field evaluation.”

The DOE and GSA will be evaluating technologies across three broad categories: 1) high-performance/low-carbon building technologies and solutions, which include electrification of major building loads, larger-scale and integrated heat pump systems, retrofit heat recovery systems, electrification of major loads, and building envelope retrofits; 2) on-site energy generation and storage systems, which include building-integrated photovoltaics (PV), high-efficiency PV, solutions to better integrate PV and storage into building management systems, solar and geothermal, on-site distributed wind, hydrogen fuel cells, and electric vehicle fleet charging solutions; and 3) greenhouse gas reduction or capture technologies, which includes on-site carbon capture for fuel-fired processes and technologies that use next-generation refrigerants with low or no global warming potential.

“We are particularly excited for this year’s RFI as it will be central to guiding new investments and initiatives to unlock the power of next-generation building technologies,” Kevin Powell, GSA program director for the Center for Emerging Building Technologies, said. “We look forward to helping validate the technical aspects of the innovations and evaluating their potential for future deployment.”

This is being done through GSA’s Green Proving Ground program, through which 90 technologies have been selected for evaluation, and 23 have been deployed in more than 500 facilities across GSA’s real estate portfolio.