Strategic Issues

The high-technology sector (laboratories, cleanrooms, data centers) contains among the most energy-intensive types of facilities, and yet many lag behind typical buildings in terms of attention paid to energy efficiency. At the extreme, a class-1 cleanroom can use 500-1000 times as much energy per square foot as a typical office building. An assessment identified that California laboratory-type facilities alone use 111 trillion BTUs of energy each year, including 8.8 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity (equivalent to 2100 megawatts of peak electrical power) and 21 TBTUs of natural gas, at a cost of $700 million. The cost-effective savings potential is on the order of 50%. The business case for improved energy efficiency is strong.

"Good technology" alone will not succeed in capturing the energy savings potential in high-tech facilities. Deployment is often the missing link. More specifically, the path from the lab to the marketplace is often characterized as Research > Development > Demonstration > Deployment. Success is not obtainable if a step is missed or deficient.

Research & Development is clearly the first step. The development of roadmaps for laboratories and cleanrooms as well as data centers has helped to establish R&D priorities. An illustrated in-depth discussion for laboratory fume hoods can be found here.

Demonstration projects are a critical step to verify engineering expectations for performance, and build awareness and confidence in the new technologies and practices.

Finally deployment requires a major shift in gears, involving partnerships with utilities, addressing regulatory barriers, etc. The key natinoal initiati USEPA and USDOE collaborate on a national initiative—Laboratories for the 21st Century—to raise the energy efficiency of laboratory-type facilities. The primary guiding principle of the Labs21 program is that improving the energy efficiency and environmental performance of a laboratory requires examining the entire facility from a "whole building" perspective. Adopting this perspective allows laboratory owners to improve the efficiency of the entire facility, rather than focusing on specific laboratory components. As Labs21 participants understand, improving the efficiency of individual components without examining their relation to the entire system can eliminate opportunities to make other more significant efficiency improvements.