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A common obstacle to accelerating American investment in home energy efficiency is the up-front cost of home energy upgrades and other sustainable improvements. To overcome this barrier in Florida—where a hot, humid climate can send utility bills soaring when temperatures rise—St. Lucie County used $2.9 million in seed funding from the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Better Buildings Neighborhood Program (BBNP) to create the Solar and Energy Loan Fund (SELF).

Many residential and commercial buildings leak air like sieves, wasting up to 40% of their heating and cooling energy. The primary reason for this energy loss is gaps and holes that exist in buildings’ air ducts. Getting an airtight seal on every connection can be difficult; even with skillful installation and generous applications of mastic (the putty used to seal joints), leakage still occurs. Therefore, most people resign themselves to losing money and enduring uneven temperatures. Mark Modera, an expert in energy performance at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), however, was convinced there had to be a better way.

As light-emitting diode (LED) performance continues to improve and prices continue to drop, adoption continues to increase. According to the latest Department of Energy (DOE) Revolution…Now report, total installation of LED A-type bulbs (the most common type) exceeded 200 million last year, growing 160% over 2014, and now accounting for 6% of all currently installed A-type lamps. That growth has been enabled by a 94% reduction in cost since 2008.

The toolkit integrates new and existing technical tools that give small and medium commercial buildings the ability to analyze and evaluate measures for HVAC equipment, interior equipment, lighting and/or whole building measures.

Healthcare accounts for 9% of the energy used in U.S. commercial buildings, and lighting represents the largest electricity use in all of healthcare. But as scientists learn more about light’s nonvisual effects—such as the role it’s known to play in suppressing the release of melatonin, a hormone that helps control the sleep-wake cycle—it’s becoming increasingly clear that light-emitting diode (LED) healthcare lighting offers an opportunity to address more than just visual needs.

Traditional supermarket refrigeration systems found in most U.S. grocery stores require a substantial amount of energy to keep fruits and vegetables fresh year round. An average supermarket consumes nearly 2 million kilowatt hours per year, and refrigeration accounts for nearly half of that. They are also prone to significant refrigerant leakage—20 to 25% leakage a year of the two to four thousand pound refrigerant inventory—emitting environmentally harmful greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

For the past two years, a team of professors and graduate students at Virginia Tech, in close consultation with industry, have been developing BEMOSS through a DOE Building Technologies Office award. The goal: make it easier for smaller building owners to use low-cost building automation or energy management systems to cut their energy costs.

Energy costs are a large operational expense for schools and universities – comprising the second-largest such expense for school districts, after teacher’s salaries. What’s more, lighting has been underutilized as a classroom tool, despite clear evidence that adjusting light levels and quality to the task at hand can improve student performance. 

One of the biggest initial barriers to the widespread adoption of energy-efficient light-emitting diodes (LEDs) has been the cost. While considerable progress has been made on that front, further cost reductions will result in even wider adoption and thus greater energy savings – which will be deepened by continued improvements in efficacy.

Thanks to a DOE Building Technologies Office funding award, QM Power is demonstrating its technology, called the Q-Sync fan motor, in supermarkets across the country, with DOE and utilities verifying the savings. Customers are now using these successful demonstrations to accept and commercialize the Q-Sync fan in their refrigeration units.

A liquid sealant developed by Dow Chemical, and evaluated at DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, was recognized recently for its superior sealant qualities and performance. LIQUIDARMOR, marketed by Dow, won the 2016 Gold Edison Award for Building Construction & Lighting. The Edison Awards honor the best in innovation and excellence in the development of new products and services.

National Lab-Industry Partnership Develops New Technology, Surpasses DOE Efficiency and Cost Goals

Home heating is the largest energy expense for most U.S. homeowners and accounts for nearly 30% of energy used in the nation’s residential buildings. Millions of homeowners in colder regions of the country do not have natural gas available, leaving furnaces to be fueled with heating oil, propane, or electricity. This can often result in higher heating bills for homeowners.

About 10% of the energy used in U.S. buildings—approximately 4 quads per year—compensates for energy lost through windows. To address this inefficiency, architects, engineers, and home-builders are advocating the use of high-performance windows, which are composed of insulated glass units (IGUs). IGUs lessen unwanted heat gain by combining insulating frames and multiple panes, thin film coatings, and special gas fills between the panes, while selecting for other properties, such as transmittance of visible light and solar heat gain.

Three-dimensional printing is revolutionizing how we manufacture objects in almost every industry—from vehicles to medical devices to biotech. Now, the University of Maryland, through a partnership with 3D Systems and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Building Technologies Office, has used 3D printing to prototype one of the most important enabling technologies in a building—the heat exchanger.

Commercial air conditioners, often referred to as rooftop units (RTUs), are commonly used across commercial building sectors such as schools, restaurants, big box retailers, and small office buildings. These heating, ventilation and air conditioning units condition almost half of all U.S. commercial floor space. But commonly they are old and inefficient, wasting anywhere from $900 to $3,700 per unit annually.

The ARIES Collaborative, a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Building America research team, recently developed and evaluated methods to reduce energy use in factory-built housing, as compared to best practice HUD-code construction. The results of this research prove that it is technically feasible to construct factory-built homes to be up to 50% more energy efficient for nominal increased cost. 

One recent addition to the arsenal of cost-effective efficiency measures is low-emissivity (low-e) storm windows. A low-e coating or glazing is a thin layer deposited directly on the surface of one or more panes of glass. The coating increases the window’s energy efficiency by reflecting radiant heat. Installing a low-e storm window over a low performing window can reduce a home’s heating and cooling costs by 10%–35%.

New HVAC, water heating, and appliance technologies that work without conventional refrigerants are critical for the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to reach its long-term goal of cutting building energy use in half and reducing environmental impacts. For the past 100 years, heat pumps, air conditioners, and refrigerators have relied on vapor compression to operate. However, conventional refrigerants used in vapor-compression equipment contribute to global climate change when released into the atmosphere.

Window innovations developed in collaboration with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory are cutting energy cost for American families, businesses, institutions, and governments every year. With funding from the Energy Department, Berkeley Lab has developed technologies that help prevent energy from escaping out of windows.

In April, the Energy Department recognized Better Buildings Challenge San Antonio, Texas area partners.  Dr. Kathleen Hogan, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Energy Efficiency met with Macy’s and the San Antonio Housing Authority (SAHA), learning how each organization is meeting their commitments to improve the energy use of their entire respective building portfolios by at least 20% over the next decade. 

Research supported by the Energy Department’s Building Technologies Office that led to a major breakthrough in refrigeration systems’ efficiency is now being carried by a major U.S. refrigerant wholesaler. Marketed as Solstice N40, the new refrigerant also was named an R&D 100 Award Finalist in 2015. Solstice N40 is expected to yield big savings for supermarkets nationwide and greatly reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

In April 2014, twenty-eight college and university teams from the U.S. and Canada participated in the inaugural U.S. Department of Energy’s Challenge Home Student Design Competition at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colorado.

By tooling up a manufacturing line in Tennessee, where jobs are created, Diversified Power International, LLC is able to manufacture its product in the United States instead of Taiwan.

New energy efficiency standards for external power supplies will reduce energy consumption, energy bills, and carbon emissions.

Xcel Energy, a Minnesota-based utility that supplies electricity and natural gas to eight states, employed two EERE-developed products in developing a program management tool for its Energy Design Assistance (EDA) program. Through EDA, Xcel provides energy consulting services to construction projects to encourage efficient energy use.