NREL Partner Forum Tackles the Built Environment

Federal, Utility, and Industry Partners Talk Transforming Energy at the Grid Edge

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Two questions took center stage at the U.S. Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s (NREL’s) 2024 Partner Forum: How do we transition from today’s energy-gobbling, emissions-spewing built environment to one where buildings help move our national clean energy and climate goals forward? And how do we do it in a way that benefits everyone—without breaking the bank?

On Aug. 6, 2024, nearly 150 innovators, energy planners, analysts, entrepreneurs, and researchers converged on NREL’s South Table Mountain Campus in Golden, Colorado, to focus on that highly complex, seemingly intractable problem: decarbonizing the built environment.

In Transforming Energy, Buildings Are Key

This year’s Partner Forum—the eighth since the event’s 2017 debut—featured diverse voices from the U.S. military, industry, national laboratories, utilities, state and local governments, and federal agencies. Throughout day one, presenters and panelists explored various pathways, innovations, and ideas for decarbonizing the nation’s buildings, campuses, and communities.

Along with highlighting the challenges and opportunities posed by the built environment, the two-day meeting of the minds showcased NREL’s world-class sustainable campus and facilities as hotbeds of innovation and collaboration.

NREL Leads in Opening Its Doors to Partners

Bill Farris, NREL’s associate laboratory director for Innovation, Partnering, and Outreach, kicked off the event by emphasizing the need for integrated, collaborative solutions.

“There is no one-size-fits-all approach for this,” he said. “Reach out to each other, share your experiences, and let’s move this energy transition forward.”

In welcoming attendees, NREL Director Martin Keller highlighted the new Research and Innovation Laboratory, the soon-to-be-built Energy Materials and Processing at Scale laboratory, and the state of Colorado’s planned Global Energy Park as lynchpins in fulfilling the critical need to expand lab space. “We need collaborative space with industry partners to accelerate designs to the next level,” he said.

Keynote speaker Chris Migneron, senior vice president and national design director at JE Dunn Construction, said a growing sense of urgency is pushing sustainable building design forward.

“It’s an exciting time where it feels like momentum and progress are being filtered down to communities,” Migneron said, while conceding “there is a lot of noise in the space, which is making some of those headwaters more difficult to navigate.”

Migneron highlighted several trends, including:

• A shift in expectations around sustainability since the COVID-19 pandemic
• More frequent and severe extreme weather events
• The burgeoning power demands of industry
• A nonstandardized regulatory environment
• A push toward “deconstruction” and recycling of materials.

Citing the latter as one example of why partnerships are key to maintaining momentum, Migneron said, “From a construction standpoint, we have to warranty for a year. How do we do that if we don’t know how a material will perform? So validation becomes really critical.”

Johney Green, NREL associate laboratory director for mechanical and thermal engineering sciences, encouraged partners to take advantage of NREL’s world-class facilities along with its deep experimental capabilities, decision-support tools, and community engagement experience to better understand building performance, model pathways to electrification, and increase accessibility.

Through dynamic presentations and lively discussions, participants then heard about several innovative solutions and strategies that stand to benefit from a focus on partnering to transform energy through buildings.

Boosting Building Performance To Enhance Resilience

Bringing decades of experience designing and operating buildings in extreme environments to bear, Bruno Grunau moderated the first panel discussion. As director of applied research for communities in extreme environments, Grunau leads the sustainable buildings work at NREL’s Far-North campus in Fairbanks, Alaska.

Grunau kicked off the panel on “Resilient Buildings Across Environments” with an overview of the energy, infrastructure, and health challenges confronting communities in one of the most extreme environments on Earth. “We have a saying—'Alaska tough’—if it works in Alaska, it can work anywhere,” he said, inviting the four panelists to talk about the resilience challenges and opportunities their organizations face.

Two panelists represented the U.S. military: Matt Haupt, energy director for Naval Facilities Engineering Systems Command, and Jonathan Petry, U.S. Department of Defense program analyst for a healthy and resilient built environment.

“We have to prepare for the worst in the future,” Petry said. “In addressing climate, first we have to understand our vulnerability.”

Haupt emphasized the pivotal role partnerships play in helping the military identify which solutions it can integrate to strike the right balance between bolstering resilience and executing the mission.

Alexis Pelosi, senior adviser for climate to the secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), said HUD also leans on partners to carry out its mission, which includes making U.S. communities more resilient. Pelosi said partnerships help ensure technology investments address the complex challenges of the many low-income and disadvantaged communities HUD serves while also being replicable.

Steve Ruby, chief innovation officer at design-build contractor McKinstry, touted the value of transparency in making the best decisions about resilience. He also framed emergent grid constraints as an opportunity to advance microgrids, long-term-duration storage, and decarbonization: “One of the things we need to take most advantage of, given that necessity is the mother of invention, is the urgency” to deploy solutions that reduce reliance on the grid, he said.

In the interim, utilities are wrestling with how to meet that burgeoning demand—the focus of the next panel discussion.

A Whole Other Animal: Powering the Computing Revolution

Doug Arent, executive director of Strategic Public-Private Partnerships at NREL, moderated the conversation on “Powering the Computing Revolution,” which featured three different perspectives.

Cullen Bash, vice president of R&D at Hewlett Packard Labs, shared how Hewlett Packard Enterprises (HPE) partnered with NREL to develop Eagle, the first liquid-cooled high-performance computer ever deployed. Teasing a highlight of the next day’s NREL campus tour, including the Energy Systems Integration Facility’s sustainable data center, he previewed NREL’s newest HPE supercomputer, called Kestrel, which delivered a fivefold increase in computing capacity while conserving vast amounts of energy.

Kathryn Valdez, assistant vice president of Corporate Planning and Carbon-Free Tech Strategy at Xcel Energy, discussed Xcel’s focus on bringing renewables and transmission online to replace all of its coal plants and meet its industry-leading goal to cut carbon emissions 80% by 2050. While Xcel has made significant progress, she said the challenge posed by the data-center boom is a whole different animal.

“The data centers are saying, ‘We want full-bore power all the time,’ and that’s what we’re struggling with as we peel back some of these dispatchable solutions,” she said.

“What we’re very focused on is that these new loads have to carry their own weight,” Valdez concluded, alluding to a focus on equity in rate design. “We can’t subsidize them across our residential customer base.”

Marc Aveni, assistant director of General Services for Loudoun County, Virginia, knows a thing or two about the social aspects of data centers. Loudoun County is home to “Data Center Alley,” one of the world’s largest concentrations of data centers. And while revenues from data centers fund amenities like schools, parks, and recreation centers, many residents would prefer not to have data centers near their homes.

To help alleviate the public’s aversion to living near data centers, Aveni sees an opportunity for “quick wins” through high-visibility outreach efforts, such as diverting excess heat from data centers to community swimming pools, as one county resident suggested.

The lunch hour was framed by presentations from Mary Brown, senior sustainability specialist at Wells Fargo, and Loren Burnett, CEO and cofounder of Prometheus Materials.

Brown shared how Wells Fargo and NREL will take their flagship technology accelerator program, the Wells Fargo Innovation Incubator, known as IN², to the next level. And Burnett described how Prometheus has mimicked nature’s process for creating seashells and coral reefs to develop a zero-carbon alternative to concrete.

Expanding Electrical Capacity Without Breaking the Bank

As the next panel took the stage, moderator Gene Rodrigues, assistant secretary for Electricity at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), delivered a rousing introduction to a top-of-mind topic: how to achieve a “massive and rapid expansion of the ability to take energy from where it’s generated to where it’s needed”—without breaking the bank.

“Whether you’re a fancy scientist at a national lab, a clip-on-tie-wearing public servant like me, or someone in the industry who comes up with solutions, we absolutely must recognize that affordability is the key to making things happen,” Rodrigues said.

Introducing his panelists as disruptors who “will be foundational to changing the very way we think about reliability and affordability in the same breath,” he gave each an opportunity to share what they are doing.

Justin Hill, a research engineer in Intelligent Buildings Research at Southern Company Services, and Matt Hubbard, manager of distributed device strategy at Portland General Electric (PGE), described the sea changes their organizations have undergone in the past decade.

“Back then, we had too much capacity,” Hill said, recalling his 2012 start in Intelligent Buildings Research. A few years later, when a cold snap hit the Southeast, Hill had to sleep at the office, sharing a cubical space with about 25 colleagues. “That whole experience changed a lot of mindsets.”

It also changed the way the system operated. “We went from historically summer peaking toward a winter-peaking utility quickly,” Hill said. “Now, with data center growth, decarbonization efforts, and EVs (electric vehicles), our demand forecasts have increased exponentially year-round.”

Meanwhile, PGE went from being a winter-peaking utility to having summer peaking. To address the resultant grid constraints, Hubbard leads initiatives like the Smart Grid Testbed and the Connected Communities Project, a DOE-funded collaboration among NREL, the Energy Trust of Oregon, and Oregon-based Community Energy Projects.

As a core element of the latter, Hubbard said, “We are actually building a flexible load capacity up to 1.4 MW in the next five years.” Along with planned retrofits to approximately 500 buildings, Hubbard’s team is installing distributed energy resources (DERs), including solar plus storage, thermostats, and heat pump water heaters.  

Hubbard said NREL’s support has been pivotal to PGE’s ability to quickly stand up a community model. “The team at NREL has taken information about where we expect DERs to go and modeled it in such a way that we can run various scenarios with combinations of the different DERs, helping us identify the value from those economically and understand how to best deploy them during those significant peak events.”

As senior manager of the Beneficial Electrification team at ComEd, the largest electric utility in Illinois, Cristina Botero oversees roughly $80 million of annual investments in beneficial electrification, which she defined as “electrification that brings benefits to all of our customers.” Those investments are heavily focused on transportation electrification, including incentives and rebates for residential, commercial, industrial, and public-sector programs.

“The elephant in the room when it comes to transportation electrification is that when you don’t do it right, low-income customers, equity-eligible areas, and other critical communities won’t receive the full benefits,” Botero said. “So ComEd is being really intentional about how we design our programs to make the transition equitable and ensure the benefits reach our most vulnerable customers and communities.”

As the panel wrapped up, Rodrigues expressed optimism about the opportunities to increase affordability of grid-edge solutions with all 17 national laboratories working together to solve the biggest problems. But he also placed some of the onus on utilities.

“Affordability can’t mean ‘I’m just going to do what I aways did,’ because that is the recipe for creating disaster for the reliability, resilience, security, and affordability of service in this country,” he said. “So I argue the utility has an obligation to make prudent investments on behalf of its ratepayers, its customers, and its communities. And that must be a long-term perspective.”

It was the perfect segue into the visioning exercise led by Roderick Jackson, NREL’s laboratory program manager for Building Technologies R&D, who moderated the final panel: “Accelerating Heat Pump Technology Adoption.”

Accelerating Heat Pump Technology Adoption

“Close your eyes, and imagine it’s 2050 and we’ve met all of our net-zero carbon goals,” Jackson began. “OK, open your eyes. We are not there yet. Full-scale adoption is challenged by cost. It’s challenged by infrastructure. It’s also challenged by the fact that we have to do it equitably. It’s not enough to close our eyes and imagine.”

Introducing a panel of three speakers representing “an established company, a small but mighty innovator, and a utility that realizes if we don’t get there with equity we don’t get there, he said, “These are the folks who will get us there.”

Erica Gallant, who leads Technology Strategy and Partnerships at Trane Technologies, kicked off the heat pump discussion with a focus on opportunities in the commercial market and the role customers play in applying options like energy storage and waste heat to achieve the very high lifts needed while keeping costs down.

“Customer partnerships are critical because we’re learning together,” Gallant said. “Customers are looking to us for solutions, and we’re looking to them to define the problems.”

Speaking to challenges were Wale Odukomaiya, a former NREL researcher who is now the advanced concepts team lead and a principal engineer for Colorado startup AtmosZero, and David Jacot, director of distributed energy solutions for the power system at the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power.

Although Jacot is confident that 100% penetration of heat pumps is achievable by 2050, he believes the policy environment will largely determine the trajectory of that shift.

“If the layering of incentives between the utility and the federally available tax rebates are covering a substantial proportion of the replacement costs and the economics of the switch are favorable, a lot can happen,” Jacot said. “If you take away two-thirds of that potential federal subsidy, then nothing is going to happen until the furnace or the AC fails.”

Odukomaiya said the low cost of natural gas in the United States poses barriers to adoption for the high-temperature electric heat pump boiler AtmosZero designed to replace natural-gas-fired boilers in industrial applications.

“It’s hard to compete with natural gas,” Odukomaiya said, suggesting technical analysis to understand under what circumstances electric heat pumps can be cost competitive with gas, as well as pilot projects, case studies, federal funding, and incentive programs, as ways partners can help startups like AtmosZero de-risk newer technologies.  

Bringing the first day of the 2024 Partner Forum to a close, NREL Strategic Partnerships Office Director Andrea Watson encouraged attendees to continue the great conversations and further explore potential project ideas during the side meetings, demonstrations, and tours planned for day two.

“I hope you walk away seeing how NREL truly believes that we cannot get to our vision of a clean energy future for the world without partnerships,” Watson said. “And I hope you walk away having learned something or made a new connection that you can take home to your organization to help advance the clean energy transition or whatever mission you are working on, because that’s really why we are all here.”

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