Achieving Executive Order 13514—20 Years Early

摘要

The Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) had a vision in 2007 to design the worlds most energy-efficient building. The Research Support Facility, the new NREL administrative headquarters in Golden, Colo., needed to be a Class A office building that could hold up to 800 people; however, as NREL is the nation's renewable energy laboratory, it couldn't be just any Class A office building. NREL's mission is to find more effective ways to harvest energy from sources such as wind, solar and hydrogen and bring these technologies to market for the betterment of our nation. NREL chose to prove its research by designing its Class A headquarters facility to a zero-net-energy standard.