Transitioning to zero carbon in the building sector: an overview of challenges and ongoing work by the NREL’s ResStock and ComStock teams.

The building sector of the U.S. currently emits 33% of our national energy related GHG emissions and 5% of GHG emissions globally, so reducing emissions from the U.S. buildings sector is a critical piece of any decarbonization effort. Developing effective strategies, however, is challenging, due to a variety of factors such as the heterogeneity of the building stock, the decentralization of building policy and data, the high percentage of fossil fuels burned on-premises, and the high necessary investment to retrofit the existing building stock to low-GHG performance. Furthermore, there are serious concerns about increasing inequities from such a low-GHG transition if the direct (e.g., upgrade capital expenses) or indirect (e.g., increased rent) costs were passed onto those most vulnerable in society.

In this presentation, Dr. Reyna will overview existing and planned efforts by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) to provide detailed analysis and data on the impacts of decarbonization to federal, state, and local decision-makers. She will discuss how NREL’s ResStock and ComStock tools and their resulting data products can be leveraged by researchers and future key gaps in the building decarbonization space.

Dr. Janet L. Reyna is a senior research engineer in the Building Technologies and Sciences Center at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory where she leads development and research with NREL’s ResStock tool. Before joining NREL, she was an ORISE Science & Technology Policy Fellow at the DOE Building Technologies Office. Her research interests include assessing the energy and environmental impacts of urban areas at city and regional scales and developing decarbonization strategies for the U.S. building sector. A key goal of Dr. Reyna’s research is to provide quantitative information to support policy and decision-making. She has expertise in life cycle assessment, energy forecasting, building stock energy modeling, vehicle emissions simulation, and spatial analysis.

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