News Release: R&D 100 Awards Honor NREL Innovation
R&D World magazine today presented the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) with one of its annual R&D 100 Awards for research innovations.
Including this year’s winners, NREL has received 72 R&D 100 awards since 1982.
Given annually, the R&D 100 Awards honor the 100 most innovative technologies of the past year and are chosen by an independent panel of judges. WTWH Media LLC, the Cincinnati-based publisher that oversees the awards, announced the winning NREL technology.
Developed in collaboration with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the Standard Energy Efficiency Data (SEED) Platform is a data management and analysis tool that helps cities improve their building stock and reduce carbon emissions. Buildings produce one-third of total carbon emissions in the United States; yet, with 146 million unique buildings spread across the nation, there is no one-size-fits-all solution to reduce these emissions. SEED is a software tool used by state and local governments that collects, organizes, and cleans data from diverse buildings to create a detailed picture of the building stock—including the size, energy performance, and fuel types of each building. From there, decision-makers can easily analyze building trends and create effective carbon-reduction programs.
The platform was developed hand in hand with cities such as Washington, D.C., and San Francisco to ensure it would meet their needs. Today, SEED and other spinoffs are used in 10 jurisdictions across the United States to reduce the energy consumption and carbon emissions of their building stock and bring the nation closer to a zero-emission economy.
NREL is the U.S. Department of Energy's primary national laboratory for renewable energy and energy efficiency research and development. NREL is operated for the Energy Department by the Alliance for Sustainable Energy LLC.