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Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.

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DOE OSTI2026

Understanding the Costs and Barriers of Residential Electrical Panel and Service Upgrades

Upgrading electrical panels and services in U.S. homes represents a significant barrier to building modernization, imposing considerable costs, delays, and procedural uncertainties on homeowners, contractors, utilities, and building departments. Although cost databases document individual infrastructure activities, they rarely capture the integrated, whole-project perspective required to understand how electrical upgrades are planned, executed, and regulated. Existing research is often geographically constrained, narrowly scoped, or derived from limited samples, leaving significant knowledge gaps unaddressed. This study examines the timelines and costs associated with residential electrical panel and service upgrades using data from a national cross- sectional survey conducted in summer 2025. The survey captured responses from 140 stakeholders across 34 states, including building industry professionals, utility staff, and building department staff. Findings indicate that project duration and cost increase substantially with building size though patterns vary by infrastructure type. Most single-family and small multifamily projects were completed within 30 days, whereas medium and large multifamily buildings show longer and less predictable timelines. Service rating increases modestly extend project duration, but building type and size were the primary determinants of delays. Cost patterns were similar: customer-side equipment and panel replacements scale predictably with building size, while utility-side costs are highly variable, often triggered by threshold-driven infrastructure upgrades such as transformer replacements. Permit fees vary considerably between jurisdictions but generally represent a minor proportion of total project costs. These findings identify electrical upgrades as a significant barrier to residential building costs and highlight the need for improved stakeholder coordination, streamlined permitting, and strategies that reduce upgrade requirements while maintaining safety and code compliance.

Casquero-Modrego, Nuria↗
DOE OSTI2021

Best Practices Guide: Benchmarking Energy Efficiency in Laboratories

Purpose and Audience A wide spectrum of laboratory owners, ranging from universities to federal agencies, have explicit goals for energy efficiency and greenhouse gas reductions in their facilities. For example, new federal buildings and major renovations of existing buildings are to reduce fossil fuel-generated energy consumption by 90% in 2025, and 100% in 2030, compared with a 2003 baseline (FEMP n.d.). Minnesota SB2030 standard requires achieving an 80% reduction from the average building baseline for commercial, institutional, and industrial buildings (SB2030 n.d). A laboratory—new or existing—is much more likely to meet energy efficiency goals if quantitative metrics and targets are explicitly specified and tracked over the life cycle of the building, from design through construction, commissioning, operations, and renovations. If efficiency targets are not explicitly and properly defined, any additional capital costs or design time associated with attaining higher efficiencies can be difficult to justify relative to other priorities. The purpose of this guide is to provide guidance on how to specify and compute energy efficiency metrics and benchmarks for laboratories, at the whole-building as well as the system level. The information in this guide can be used to incorporate quantitative metrics and targets into new construction or retrofit of existing facilities. For information on strategies and technologies to achieve energy efficiency, the reader is referred to I2SL resources, including technology best practice guides and case studies.

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗
DOE OSTI2023

Advanced Building Construction (ABC) Research Opportunities Report: Industrializing Construction to Decarbonize Buildings

The DOE Building Technologies Office generally seeks to develop, demonstrate, and accelerate the adoption of cost-effective technologies, techniques, and tools in support of an equitable transition to a decarbonized building stock and energy system by 2050. This ABC Innovations Roadmap specifically focuses on and prioritizes innovations that support the industrialization of whole building retrofits and rapid growth of efficient new construction. The content relates to the integration of technologies and industrialization of processes associated with building construction and renovation. The ABC Innovations Roadmap cross-applies innovations in both the new and existing building sectors with a focus on widescale applicability. Installation flexibility is key to commoditizing solutions that are applicable for a wide variety of buildings (e.g., different building types, vintages, architectural details, and system configurations) and to help simplify decarbonization processes for the workforce.

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗
DOE OSTI2024

From IMPEL to Impact: Lessons Learned in Accelerating Innovative Building Technologies

The built environment is a complex ecosystem of social institutions and physical infrastructures. Innovation and entrepreneurship in the building industry are critical levers for market transformation toward equitable climate action. However, climate tech innovation for the built environment is not moving fast enough for global needs, and it lacks fundamental diversity, leading to inequitable outcomes. IMPEL (Incubating Market-propelled Entrepreneurial-mindset at the Labs and Beyond) - a U.S. Department of Energy incubator–addresses these critical issues. Over five years, IMPEL has enabled 250 innovators, including 55% women and diverse founders, to accelerate their buildings and clean energy technologies towards market and climate impact. IMPEL provides access to strategic mentoring and coaching, carbon tools training, testbeds, and powerful public-private pipelines, including industry demonstrations, non-dilutive grants, and venture capital networks. The IMPEL innovation ecosystem has accelerated the pace of innovation and market adoption of building decarbonization technologies. In this paper, leverage the IMPEL stakeholder ecosystem - from innovators to investors and product industry to policymakers - to analyze the critical barriers to decarbonization still encountered in the building industry. We study the IMPEL approach and highlight lessons learned that benefit young businesses pursuing innovative building and building-edge energy technologies to develop new ideas and products. Finally, we propose a ‘market forming’ framework to improve the quality and efficiency of the entrepreneurial ecosystem in the building industry. This framework could scale vetted technologies and the participation of diverse founders to de-risk the climate tech

Singh, Reshma↗
DOE OSTI2022

The Future of Building Science Education with the U.S. Department of Energy Solar Decathlon: Preprint

Experience the future of Building Science Education with the U.S. Department of Energy Solar Decathlon, from community-focused designs to real-life innovative zero energy buildings constructed by students. In this paper, we will introduce the Solar Decathlon programs and a reimagined Building Science Education curriculum that is transforming education to inspire future building design professionals and bring sustainable, equitable design and construction strategies to the real world. The Solar Decathlon is a collegiate-level building design competition that challenges students in 10 Contests, from embodied environmental impact to affordability and resilience. We will cover the structure of the competition and its two Challenges - the Build Challenge and the Design Challenge - as well as additional programs that impact all aspects of the buildings industry. These programs include the Solar Decathlon Building Science Education course, a free online video series that provides students and working professionals with building science fundamentals; the Design Partners Program, which connects innovative student design teams and local building owners seeking low-risk, low-cost opportunities to incorporate sustainable design alternatives into their building portfolio; and Solar Decathlon Pro, a program piloted in 2021 that brings Solar Decathlon resources to design professionals. The Solar Decathlon's effective approach to bringing real-world solutions to building science empowers future professionals to do impactful work.

buildings↗
DOE OSTI2024

Carbon-sequestration gradient insulation composites

The massive use of carbon-sequestration building materials promises a potential global carbon sink in decarbonizing the building industry. Renewable biogenic materials from abundant agriculture waste for building practice have been around over thousands of years. However, in addition to their flammability and moisture problems, addressing their low thermal and structural performance is also becoming indispensable and urgent when it comes to environmentally sustainable and energy-efficient buildings. Here, we report a nature-inspired biogenic gradient insulation composite with an optimized silica concentration of 30 wt %, a density of 0.246 g/cm 3 , and a porosity of 86%. The gradient hybrid composite exhibits a thermal conductivity of 28.2 mW m -1 K -1 , which is the lowest achieved under optimal preparation conditions. Here, it also shows a flexural modulus of 590 MPa for the aerogel-rich layer without surface modification, and it demonstrates superior fire retardancy and superhydrophobicity after surface treatment.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗
DOE OSTI2022

The Demand for a Domestic Offshore Wind Energy Supply Chain

In March of 2021, the Biden-Harris Administration established a National Offshore Wind Target to install 30 GW by 2030. This ambitious goal was not only intended to help reduce dependencies on fossil fuels, but also represents an opportunity to establish a new and sustainable industry in the United States. The announcement referenced the potential benefits of establishing a domestic supply chain, including the opportunity for existing suppliers to produce thousands of components while creating tens of thousands of jobs over the course of the decade. This vision by the Biden-Harris Administration aligns with the perspective of the offshore wind industry. At a Leadership 100 event hosted by the Business Network for Offshore wind in 2019, offshore wind developers and manufacturers identified the need for a roadmap outlining a pathway to a domestic supply chain as the top priority facing the industry. Building up domestic manufacturing capabilities will not only energize local industries but can potentially de-risk individual project by reducing reliance on importing resources from European or Asian markets. Although establishing a domestic supply chain will require significant investment, it has the potential to create substantial benefits throughout the industry and, by extension, on the decarbonization goals of the United States. This study characterizes the challenges and opportunities facing the growth of a domestic supply chain industry and evaluates the potential benefits that could be achieved through the creation of the supply chain. This report is the first of a two-part series which will describe the full supply chain roadmap and the associated benefits; the current report focuses on the high-level deployment, workforce, and component requirements that need to be met to achieve the National Offshore Wind Target. We will present: 1. A deployment pipeline that demonstrates the pathway to 30 GW, the associated demand for major fixed-bottom and floating offshore wind components (turbines, foundations, cables, substations), and the vessel and port requirements to support these installation activities. 2. A series of sensitivity analyses showing how the demand for components, ports, and vessels changes for different technology pathways and availability of the global supply chain. 3. An estimate of the total number of jobs that would be required to support these deployment scenarios under varying levels of assumed domestic content. 4. A comprehensive list of the Tier 1, 2, and 3 components (finished components, subassemblies, and subcomponents) required to construct fixed-bottom and floating offshore wind projects. 5. A discussion of critical path components that represent a significant challenge, bottleneck, or risk for a future domestic supply chain.

17 WIND ENERGY↗
DOE OSTI2024

Review of Life Cycle Cost Analysis Tools

Life cycle costing (LCC) is a vital aspect of decision-making in building retrofitting. It allows stakeholders to thoroughly assess all expenses involved throughout the lifespan of these retrofits, covering initial costs; ongoing operation, maintenance, and repair costs; and disposal costs of the system. The Federal Energy Management Program of the US Department of Energy has established clear guidelines for conducting LCC analysis, particularly for investments aimed at energy and water conservation, as well as renewable energy projects. These guidelines are detailed in the Code of Federal Regulations, 10 CFR 436, Subpart A, which outlines the methodology and procedure for LCC analysis (Department of Energy 1990). The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has developed the NIST Handbook 135 (Joshua Kneifel 2022) to standardize the process of LCC analysis within the building industry. Whereas the handbook is tailored to the needs of federal agencies, its principles and methodologies can be valuable for other organizations and industries interested in conducting life cycle costing analyses for their building projects.

29 ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY↗
DOE OSTI2022

Building the Next Generation Through 20 Years of Solar Decathlon: From Collegiate Prize to Multifaceted Clean Energy Workforce Program: Preprint

The U.S. Department of Energy Solar Decathlon, initiated in 2002 as a collegiate competition that challenges student teams to design and build high-performance, low-carbon buildings powered by renewables, has always been about developing students to be the next generation of buildings professionals. As we celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Solar Decathlon in 2022, this paper highlights its evolution from a singular prize to a multi-faceted platform preparing the broader buildings workforce to address the challenges of climate change. The original program challenged students to design and construct a residence. To improve the accessibility of the competition, the Design Challenge -- a 1-2 semester design-only competition-- was added to the Solar Decathlon platform. The Solar Decathlon has also scaled globally with events in Europe, the Middle East, China, Latin America and the Caribbean, Africa, and India. In 2021, the Solar Decathlon broadened its reach once again by introducing Solar Decathlon Pro, a zero-energy design practicum for professional architects and engineers. This paper utilizes participation data, surveys, alumni profiles, project submissions, and more to understand how changes to the program have expanded program reach to minority-serving institutions, environmental justice communities, and impacted the building industry's capacity to construct high performance and zero energy buildings. As one of the oldest federal government prizes, the Solar Decathlon offers a roadmap for dramatically increasing prize impact and demonstrates that it continues to push boundaries to tackle decarbonization and environmental justice.

build↗
DOE OSTI2024

Evaluation of Rooftop Solar Potential in Chernihiv and Lviv, Ukraine, and Efficacy of High-Resolution 3D Data Digital Twins [Slides]

NREL evaluated rooftop solar photovoltaic (PV) siting opportunities in the cities of Chernihiv and Lviv, Ukraine, leveraging very-high-resolution 3D elevation data to calculate technical potential. The study assessed total rooftop solar capacity and annual energy production. In Chernihiv and Lviv, 116,503 buildings were analyzed for their rooftop solar potential. The buildings in the study areas include a mixture of residential, commercial, and industrial buildings, characterized by diverse roof shapes and sizes. The total estimated rooftop solar capacity is 332 MWDC in Chernihiv and 873 MWDC in Lviv with annual energy production up to 376.2 GWhDC in Chernihiv and 995.5 GWhDC in Lviv. This accounting provides a clear estimate of the potential rooftop solar installations that could be realized under optimal conditions, considering both technical constraints and the geographic distribution of available rooftop space. Related to Russia's invasion of Ukraine, NREL estimates loss from buildings damaged or destroyed of 2,754 buildings, 20.15 MWDC of capacity, and 22,869 MWhDC of annual energy production in Chernihiv as well as a loss of 1,316 buildings, 34.49 MWDC of capacity, and 39,369 MWhDC of annual energy production in Lviv. The study also assessed the feasibility of adapting this methodology on a national scale using either simulated digital surface models (DSMs) or a digital twin approach. While the very-high-resolution DSM provided more precise results, the simulated DSM demonstrated reasonable accuracy for broader applications in modeling aggregated distributed solar supply. The feasibility of using a digital twin for Ukraine's national rooftop solar potential is considered promising, with certain limitations in areas with highly variable building stock and heavy war damage.

14 SOLAR ENERGY↗
DOE OSTI2020

Quantifying Thermal Performance of the Building Envelope - Beyond Common Practice

Performance metrics serve as useful tools and indicators for many applications. For the building industry, various metrics exist; typically, these metrics do not assess the whole building performance. Instead, these represent separate components or heat transfer mechanisms of a building like R-value, U-factor/value, and airtightness. The mechanisms defined under these metrics all contribute significantly to the overall thermal performance of a building but will rarely act independently. There are metrics that account for the overall energy performance of a building, such as Energy Use Intensity (EUI). However, these metrics tend to be highly influenced by how the building is operated and used. There are also metrics which provide assessment on a relative basis. These indices are based upon comparison to a baseline, which complicates meaningful metric-based energy analyses. This paper presents a performance metric developed to account for various thermal properties and behaviors of a building. The metric accounts for all the relevant mechanisms that influence heat losses and gains in buildings and is thus directly related to the energy performance. In addition, the metric is designed to comprise air infiltration and allows users to account for workmanship quality, and imperfections of the building thermal resistance due to penetrations and other installations. This paper will describe how the metric can be applied for various building types and in different climates.

Pallin, Simon B.↗
DOE OSTI2023

Advanced Building Construction (ABC) Research Opportunities Report: Industrializing Construction to Decarbonize Buildings

The U.S. building stock is responsible for 75% of total U.S. electricity use, 40% of energy use, and 35% of CO 2 emissions. To meet bold national climate change goals, the U.S. must decarbonize the building stock by 2050. However, today’s practices to build or renovate buildings to low-carbon, high-performance levels are generally labor intensive, disruptive, and too costly to quickly scale in the U.S. To retrofit 80% of the U.S. building stock in the U.S. by 2050, the retrofit rate will need to increase by about 15 times for residential buildings and two times for commercial buildings. Additionally, there is a major housing deficit in this country where nearly 600,000 people lack adequate or stable shelter, and the pace of construction is not keeping up with the growing demand. New, more industrialized, replicable, and technologically driven approaches to renovation and new building construction are imperative to help meet such significant national needs and achieve the necessary speed and scale to meet national building decarbonization goals.

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗
DOE OSTI2024

Emulation and detection of physical faults and cyber-attacks on building energy systems through real-time hardware-in-the-loop experiments

The increasing use of remote or mobile access, integrated wearable technologies, data exchange, and cloud-based data analytics in modern smart buildings is steering the building industry towards open communication technologies. The increased connectivity and accessibility could lead to more cyber-attacks in smart buildings. On the other hand, physical faults (e.g., HVAC -heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning faults) may have similar adverse impacts as those from the cyber-attacks on building energy systems, such as occupant discomfort, energy wastage, and equipment downtime. However, current physical behavior-based anomaly detection methods fail to differentiate between cyber-attacks and physical faults in building energy systems. Moreover, the challenge in collecting real-world threat data with ground truth has led researchers to rely on numerical models with user-defined assumptions, which may not accurately reflect real-world conditions due to the lack of in-situ experimental datasets. To address these challenges and gaps, this paper presents a flexible hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) testbed for generating cyber-attack and physical fault datasets and demonstrating threat detection algorithms in a real building automation system (BAS) environment. This testbed combines hardware (i.e., real BAS with local HVAC controllers and a physical network) with software (i.e., high-fidelity models to represent behaviors of building envelope and HVAC energy systems), enabling emulations of realistic threats. Five HIL experiments, including one baseline without any threats, two with physical faults, and two with cyber-attacks, were conducted to generate datasets containing detailed network traffic and system states. A joint classification framework, incorporating a network analyzer and a physical HVAC fault detector, was proposed to automatically detect cyber-physical abnormalities on BAS at both the network and the physical HVAC levels. The network analyzer comprises a conditional random fields (CRF) based command validator and a statistics-based detection strategy. The fault detector employs a weather and schedule-based pattern matching and feature-based principal component analysis (WPM-FPCA) method. Evaluation of the classification using four metrics from the multi-class confusion matrix revealed an average accuracy of 90.2%, recall of 89.7%, precision of 88.5% and F1-score of 89.2%. Finally, these results demonstrate that the proposed joint classification framework can effectively differentiate between specific types of cyber-attacks (e.g., device reinitialization attack, network Denial-of-Service attack) and physical faults (e.g., air handling unit operational fault, cooling coil valve stuck) in real time for improved building energy management.

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗
DOE OSTI2021

A Low Voltage DC Power Electronic Hub to Support Buildings

This paper presents the communication, control, and architecture, for a low voltage (nominal 480V) hybrid AC/DC microgrid for supporting small commercial buildings with critical data center loads. The proposed system is based on a dc-power electronic hub (PEH) that seamlessly integrates renewable energy resources, energy storage, and back-up generation to support commercial building economical energy management and reliability. This PEH concept provides a parallelization of critical power to the commercial and industrial buildings leading to increased efficiency and reliability compared to traditional uninterruptable power supplies. The demonstration of the proposed PEH architecture and controls is conducted through a controller hardware in the loop validation.

Starke, Michael↗
DOE OSTI2021

Certified Green Building Materials: Policy Impact Assessment

Chinese building construction is rapidly expanding, making it critical to focus on energy efficiency to curb the increase of energy consumption and emissions over a building’s lifetime. A key mechanism to do so is through building material certification systems and programs. These establish how building materials will perform and can be used to promote energy and resource efficiency, which help create a more sustainable and healthy building industry. This report begins by identifying characteristics of a strong certification system and ways to improve existing systems. To curb building energy demand, the Chinese government began developing a building material certification program to encourage energy and resource efficiency in the building sector. A timeline is provided of their program’s development and provides analysis. China’s building material database is highlighted and analyzed for their significance and opportunities for improvement. The report then continues to analyze the importance of policies such as procurement programs, and the Chinese government is developing their procurement programs for certified green building materials. To understand the potential large-scale impacts of green building material certifications, we conducted an analysis of the environmental and market impact of a nationwide green building procurement policy for all new residential and commercial construction.

29 ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY↗
DOE OSTI2026

All Systems Go: Regional Collaborations for Scaling AEC Innovation: Preprint

The high and rising cost of preserving and delivering housing in the U.S. requires changes to existing practices of finance, design, and construction. Innovative methods such as industrialized construction could offer the means to address housing undersupply while reducing delivery costs, operational costs and material waste in the building industry, but they face challenges to success and to scale. Simultaneously, construction and cleantech innovators themselves face skepticism from the traditional entrepreneurial ecosystem such as incubators and accelerators while attempting to navigate systems level challenges. To respond to this need, various public and private sector stakeholders have launched initiatives to support innovative companies. These include nonprofits such as Terner Labs and Ivory Innovations offering curated programming to architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) startups; housing developers in Minnesota and California "bundling" multiple projects together to reach economies of scale with a consistent project team; public and private sector entities developing "catalogues" of pre-approved home designs in the U.S. and Canada. This exploratory paper documents several of these emerging ecosystem-development efforts to support innovative housing approaches, characterizing them by leading stakeholder and intervention strategy based on publicly available information. The paper finds that these initiatives share similar high level goals but vary in implementation, reflecting different stakeholder priorities, regional market and policy dynamics, and housing typologies. The early stage of these efforts offer limited data for comparing actual outcomes, but the paper highlights common qualitative themes and identifies opportunities for further research and potential coordination among these efforts.

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗
DOE OSTI2025

Assessing the hygrothermal performance of bio-based materials in building wall systems

Building envelope systems are crucial in regulating thermal and moisture exchange between interior and exterior environments, accounting for approximately 28 % of building energy consumption in the United States with walls being the primary contributors. Improper selection of building envelope materials can lead to moisture-related issues, reduced resilience, and compromised durability. Hygrothermal performance assessment is a key factor in efficient building design. As such, improving the energy and hygrothermal performance of opaque wall materials, through careful assessment of material choices, is essential to enhancing building resilience, lowering energy costs, and improving occupant comfort. As the building industry seeks new strategies to reduce material energy intensity, bio-based materials emerge as a promising solution. However, their long-term hygrothermal performance in building envelope systems remains underexplored. To fill this gap, this study evaluates the hygrothermal behavior of 13 bio-based materials in residential wall systems across three U.S. climate zones. Laboratory experiments were performed to measure material properties such as density, thermal conductivity, moisture transmission, and sorption isotherms. These data were integrated into the WUFI® simulation tool to assess wall hygrothermal performance in Houston, Baltimore, and Chicago. A three-phase modeling approach was used: (1) baseline residential walls with oriented strand board (OSB) and gypsum board; (2) replacing OSB with bio-based materials; and (3) replacing drywall with bio-based materials. Results showed that the evaluated bio-based materials maintained acceptable moisture thresholds of ≤ 16 % across all climates, confirming their viability as an alternative for current sheathing materials. Furthermore, this study provides a foundation for future research and innovation in material science on the use of certain bio-based materials in high-performance, low energy use residential construction. Ultimately, providing critical data, offering a database of bio-based material properties, and supplying a simulation-based approach will help designers make informed decisions for future efficient building practices.

Bio-based materials↗
DOE OSTI2026

Utility Managed Distributed Energy Resources Intelligent Community - UDERMS iCommunity (Final Technical Report)

The Utility Managed Distributed Energy Resources Intelligent Community (UDERMS iCommunity) project, led by PacifiCorp and supported by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Building Technologies Office (Award No. DEEE0009782), aimed to demonstrate an integrated, utility-managed “behind-the-meter” distributed energy resource (DER) program connecting multifamily, commercial, institutional, and industrial buildings to deliver grid services and improve energy efficiency.

14 SOLAR ENERGY↗