As part of the Obama Administration’s efforts to improve commercial building efficiency 20% by 2020, U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu today announced a partnership with The Appraisal Foundation that will help expand access to energy efficiency and building performance information for commercial buildings and help American businesses to reduce energy waste. Under the new partnership, the Department of Energy and The Appraisal Foundation will work to ensure that appraisers nationwide have the information, practical guidelines, and professional resources they need to evaluate energy performance when conducting commercial building appraisals. This will help enable investors, building owners and operators, and others to accurately assess the value of energy efficiency as part of the building’s overall appraisal.

“Providing appraisers with the tools to accurately include energy performance when they place a value on a commercial building will help American businesses and institutions save money by saving energy,” said Secretary Chu. “If better performing buildings have a higher value, it will help enable the upfront investment for energy efficiency upgrades.”

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Energy Secretary Steven Chu recently announced nearly $15 million to support eight new research and development projects that will accelerate the development and deployment of high-efficiency solid-state lighting technologies like LEDs and OLEDs. Light-emitting diodes (LEDs) and organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) have the potential to be ten times more energy-efficient than conventional incandescent lighting and can last up to 25 times as long. The projects selected today are located in four states across the country and are focused on advancing core R&D goals, developing new products, and expanding domestic manufacturing capacity to help the U.S. remain competitive in this growing technology market.

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Are you a home performance contractor, solar company, mechanical contractor, window company or other Boulder County contractor interested in local energy efficiency retrofit programs?  As administrator for EnergySmart (formerly “Two Techs and a Truck”), Populus will be hosting an information session on January 13th for interested contractors.  The information session will provide information about EnergySmart, including the implementation plan, opportunities for contractors and program standards.  The first two hours of this information session is for all contractors, while the entire four hour session is for insulation and air-sealing contractors.

Attendance at an EnergySmart Information Session is mandatory for contractors wishing to provide services to homeowners through the EnergySmart service.  The next information session will be February 15, 2011.  Registration for these information sessions is being handled by the Boulder Green Building Guild (“BGBG”).  To learn more or to sign-up, please click here.

Vice President Biden joined U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Secretary Steven Chu today to announce the launch of the Home Energy Score pilot program. The Home Energy Score will offer homeowners straightforward, reliable information about their homes’ energy efficiency. A report provides consumers with a home energy score between 1 and 10, and shows them how their home compares to others in their region. The report also includes customized, cost-effective recommendations that will help to reduce their energy costs and improve the comfort of their homes.

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DOE announced on July 12 that it awarded $92 million in American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funds for 43 cutting-edge research projects that aim to dramatically improve how the U.S. uses and produces energy. DOE’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) is coordinating the work in 18 states. The research projects are designed to accelerate innovation in green technology while increasing U.S. competitiveness in grid-scale energy storage for renewables, power electronics, and building efficiency. The latest round of ARPA-E grants focus on three research areas: Grid-Scale Rampable Intermittent Dispatchable Storage (GRIDS), Agile Delivery of Electrical Power Technology (ADEPT), and Building Energy Efficiency Through Innovative Thermodevices (BEET-IT).

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BEET-IT will focus on cutting building energy consumption. Structures now consume 40% of U.S. primary energy, that is, energy embodied in resources prior to undergoing any human-made conversions, and account for 40% of U.S. CO2 emissions. New, more efficient methods of cooling represent a great opportunity to reduce energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions from buildings. Battelle Memorial Institute will research the absorption-osmosis cooling cycle and will develop a new air conditioning system that uses water as a refrigerant and salt as the heat absorber. The system uses reverse osmosis to efficiently separate water from the salt solution. This project will receive $400,000 in funding. These awards complete ARPA-E’s grants under its Recovery Act funding, which in three rounds since last year has selected 117 projects for $349 million in funding. See the DOE press release, the project selections (PDF 459 KB), the technical descriptions (PDF 545 KB), and the ARPA-E Web site.