Working with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), a team led by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the Brattle Group has developed A National Roadmap for Grid-Interactive Efficient Buildings. The Roadmap outlines DOE’s national goal to triple the energy efficiency and demand flexibility of the buildings sector by 2030, relative to 2020 levels. It also defines technology attributes, integration considerations, and barriers to achieving the full potential, adoption and deployment of GEB. DOE’s Building Technologies Office (BTO) makes 14 recommendations to overcome those barriers in “action steps” that all key industry stakeholders can take–starting today–to expand the prevalence of grid-interactivity in buildings.
The Roadmap defines a GEB as:
Grid-interactive efficient buildings (GEBs) are energy-efficient buildings with smart technologies characterized by the active use of distributed energy resources (DERs) to optimize energy use for grid services, occupant needs and preferences, and cost reductions in a continuous and integrated way. In doing so, GEBs can play a key role in promoting greater affordability, resilience, environmental performance, and reliability across the U.S. electric power system.
By combining smart technologies and distributed energy resources with energy efficient buildings, GEBs can provide comfort and convenience for building occupants, sell services to the power grid, and cut costs and pollution. The Roadmap finds that over the next two decades, GEBs could deliver between $100 and 200 billion in savings to the U.S. power system and cut CO2 emissions by 80 million tons per year by 2030, or 6% of total power sector CO2 emissions. That is more than the annual emissions of 50 medium-sized coal plants, or 17 million cars.
Click here to download the Roadmap.
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