August 2, 2004—Ground was recently broken on a new facility at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), designed to increase collaboration among researchers and speed the time it takes for new technologies to move from the laboratory bench to commercial manufacturing.
The building is being constructed at NREL’s main campus, on a grassy slope of South Table Mesa adjacent to the Laboratory’s existing Solar Energy Research Facility. The new facility will allow NREL to enhance its research capabilities to meet DOE’s goals for advancing solar, hydrogen and other promising clean energy technologies. The research focus in the Science & Technology Facility will be on photovoltaics, but it will also enable the expansion of research capabilities in hydrogen and other promising renewable energy technologies.
The new laboratories specifically are designed to allow researchers from a variety of different disciplines to interact and share data while they work, and include novel design features through which individual labs can be combined to form large, open spaces for collaborative research.
The Science & Technology Facility is designed to encompass advanced energy efficiency and “green building” concepts. The architecture makes good use of natural light wherever possible, and is coupled with an automated system that pares electric use by dimming unnecessary supplemental lighting. Heating, cooling and ventilation systems likewise employ many of the most sophisticated principals for energy conversation available today.
For more information, contact NREL.
