General Services Administration, Department of Energy issues RFI for technologies that increase building sustainability

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The General Services Administration (GSA) Green Proving Ground program, in partnership with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), Office for Building Technologies (BTO number), announced a new request for information (RFI) on August 1, 2024, aimed at enabling energy efficiency and decarbonization in commercial buildings, contributing to a more efficient electrical infrastructure and improving the resilience and health of occupants. Green testing ground (GPG) program makes commercial buildings in the private and public sectors available to building professionals to validate promising building technologies in real buildings. Test sites available through this program include GSA’s extensive real estate portfolio and the buildings of DOE’s Better Buildings partners, which include more than 950 organizations across the country.

When a technology is selected for evaluation in the GPG, GSA and DOE match it with one or more buildings and directly oversee the installation and evaluation. These “testing grounds” provide DOE’s national laboratory experts with the opportunity to evaluate the technical and operational characteristics of mature, but not widely implemented, building technologies in real buildings. Through the Commercial Buildings Integration (CBI) program, BTO then shares the lessons learned from these tests with the extensive network of building industry stakeholders who could install these technologies in facilities they own or operate.

DOE and GSA announced the latest cohort of GPG projects last month, bringing the total number of technologies deployed in GSA’s real estate portfolio to 54. Since 2011, the GPG program has evaluated 107 technologies, 23 of which are deployed in more than a third of GSA’s federally managed portfolio. Each year, these GPG technologies avoid 116,000 metric tons of carbon emissions and save the government $28 million.

This year's RFI is looking for emerging and sustainable technologies that support the following:

• In-depth energy renovations.
• All-electric buildings and all-electric fleets.
• Healthy and resilient buildings.
• Building materials with low embodied carbon.
• Net-zero emissions operations.
• Packages with emerging and sustainable technology solutions.

The RFI will be open for submissions until Friday, September 13, 2024 at 11:59 p.m. ET. Submissions must be technologies or solutions that are technically and commercially ready for evaluation in occupied, operational buildings. Parties interested in submitting an application may view the RFI at sam.govimmediately available on Application #FY25RFI080124For questions about the RFI, please contact: [email protected].

Originally published on Energy.gov.