Federal R&D Agenda for Net Zero Energy, High-Performance Green Buildings

摘要

The construction and buildings sector consumes enormous amounts of energy, clean water, and materials. In the United States today, the building sector accounts for 40% of the primary energy use. The use of electric power and heat in the buildings sector also accounts for about 40% of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs). If current trends continue, buildings worldwide will become the top energy consumers by 2025, and are likely to use as much energy as industry and transportation combined by 2050. The development and adoption of new Net Zero Energy and high-performance building technologies are at the core of addressing this challenge. Today, the industries that create these technologies across multiple business sectors play an increasingly important role in effective resource use and job growth, both in the domestic and the global economy. Federal research and development (R&D) investments, in concert with academic and private sector R&D activities, play a critical role in the development of new, high-performance and energy-efficient green buildings. Optimizing these R&D investments requires that they be coordinated across the Federal enterprise and aligned with R&D activities in the private sector and academia through an open and broadly distributed Federal R&D agenda. The Federal R&D agenda presented here is the consensus assessment of 16 Executive Branch Federal agencies. This Federal R&D agenda contains six major building technology goals that define the major transformational advances needed for energy, water, and material use for Net Zero Energy, high-performance green buildings. For each goal, focus areas are identified that represent the tasks that must be undertaken to achieve it. At the same time, the R&D agenda addresses the relational interdependencies among the broader goals of improving energy efficiency, increasing renewable energy use, reducing GHGs, providing healthy indoor environments, and enabling sustainability of basic resources.