12-21-11
Drexel Metals met today with the Greater Philadelphia Innovation Cluster (GPIC) for Energy Efficient Buildings regarding exploring the opportunity to work together to create awareness about the importance of creating and monitoring performance of the building envelope. The GPIC (http://gpichub.org) received $129 million from the Federal Government’s Energy Regional Innovation Cluster (E-RIC) Initiative. The award included $122 million from the U.S. DOE to create an Energy Innovation Hub to develop innovative energy efficient building technologies, designs and systems.
For more information about GPIC
The goals of the GPIC are to improve energy efficiency and reduce carbon emissions of new and existing buildings, and to stimulate private investment and quality job creation.
The GPIC will focus on full spectrum retrofit of existing average size commercial and multi-family residential buildings. The program goal is to transform the commercial building retrofit and new construction processes into a systems-delivery industry, and demonstrate building operational energy savings of 50% by 2013-2015 in a scalable, repeatable and cost effective manner across a broad building stock, while preserving workplace quality.
A comprehensive research, development and deployment program will be performed that simultaneously addresses the maturation of integrated design and system technologies, exploration of new business models and public policies that accelerate the technology adoption, and the creation of robust workforce development paths. Commercial building stock turns over slowly, and major overhauls are relatively rare. Major retrofit demonstrations are emerging, like the Empire State Building, but they are rare point solutions and achieve less than 40% energy improvement and are not generally scalable to the less than 100,000 square foot building stock.
Scalable 50% energy reduction retrofits – DOE’s building energy goal is to reduce the annual energy use of buildings by 80% in the year 2050. New approaches to design/build/operate building system technologies, new business models, public policies, and workforce development paths are required. An interim goal of demonstrating 50% energy efficiency improvement was selected to stretch beyond applying conventional solutions which have been demonstrated in select retrofit examples in the ~30% efficiency improvement range. This 50% energy efficiency goal requires that the technical, policy and workforce solutions sets are scalable to at least 50% of today’s commercial building stock. This goal demands rethinking every technical approach and solution set as well as adopting new business value propositions, public policy positions and workforce development processes.
For more information about Drexel Metals please visit our website or call 888.321.9630 x115
