Commercial Buildings Initiative
We propose a coordinated, multi-year national strategy for public-private collaboration that integrates: deployment, demonstration, and innovation to achieve the vision for "zero-energy" commercial buildings.
Overview
Context
A growing consensus has emerged that supports aggressive action to improve building energy efficiency dramatically to respond to global climate change by reducing their emissions from energy use.
Current efforts to improve energy efficiency have already made important contributions, but their progress to date in the commercial sector is not sufficient to achieve the aggressive savings needed to bring about the reductions in energy and carbon needed to truly meet the climate change challenge.
Some programs achieve 5 to 30 percent savings through incremental technology improvements, improved codes and standards, voluntary programs, utility incentives, design assistance, and tax credits. Other efforts reach 30 to 70% savings (e.g. demonstration projects with the most advanced technology)—but these improvements cover very few buildings.
Vision
By 2030, new commercial construction in the United States will be zero-energy. This can be achieved by implementing aggressive energy efficiency measures to reduce demand by 80%, and meeting the remaining energy requirements through renewable resources. These measures will also be applied to existing commercial buildings, to reduce the energy demand in the existing stock by 50%."
Zero-energy building defined. The zero-energy commercial building is one in which energy consumption has been reduced by 50 to 70 percent compared to today's buildings. The remainder of the energy comes from non-carbon based renewable sources like solar and wind.
Cooperation and coordination, not competition. Many institutions, industry bodies, and federal, state and local government agencies are already working to realize aspects of this vision. CBI is not intended to replace or compete with them—the aim is to create an umbrella in which every stakeholder is working in a coordinated way toward the same goal.
CBI's purpose is to bring together industries and all other relevant private sector parties, research institutions, and government entities to facilitate communication, provide a plan to make sure that zero-energy building technology is brought to the marketplace, and transform the entire commercial buildings sector. Neither government policy nor the free market by themselves will make this transformation happen—only deliberate acts of partnership and innovation will.
As with the Apollo Program, which put the first astronauts on the moon, and the Manhattan Project, to design, build, and test the first atomic bomb, CBI's scope is broad, is intended to affect society comprehensively, and will require a large and concerted effort among many diverse players to achieve success.
Buildings are a major part of the problem and solution concerning energy use and climate change. The building sector in the U.S. accounts for about 40% of total energy, 70% of electricity, and 40% of carbon emissions.
