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This report describes the psychrometric bin analysis that was conducted for the ASHRAE recommended and allowable operating environment zones as well as a modified allowable operating environment, discusses control strategies, and presents examples of energy-efficient data centers using alternative cooling strategies.

NREL's sustainability vision is to build a laboratory of the future that is committed to sustainability, which is built on a framework of economic viability, environmental health, and public responsibility over the long term through appropriate investment decisions and operating practices.This report shows NREL’s progress in making sustainability an integral part of its corporate culture and providing a global sustainability model

This report presents a set of 15 best practices for owners, designers, and construction teams to reach high-performance goals and maintain a competitive budget. These best practices are based on the recent experiences of the Research Support Facility owner and design-build team for the Research Support Facility (RSF) on the National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s (NREL) campus in Golden, Colorado, and show that achieving this high performance outcomes requires that all key integrated team members understand their opportunities to control capital costs.

The purpose of this handbook is to furnish guidance for planning and conducting a highperformance building charrette, sometimes called a "greening charrette." The handbook answers typical questions such as, "What is a charrette?", "Why conduct a charrette?", "What topics should we cover?", "Whom should we invite?" and "What happens after the charrette?". Owners, design team leaders, site planners, state energy office staff, and others who believe a charrette will benefit their projects will find the handbook helpful.

This paper describes how net-zero energy buildings will produce, during a typical year, enough renewable energy to offset the energy they consume from the grid.

This conference paper discusses four well-documented definitions of net-zero energy: net-zero site energy, net-zero source energy, net-zero energy costs, and net-zero energy emissions, along with pluses and minuses of each.

This paper introduces a classification system for net-zero energy buildings (ZEB) based on the renewable sources a building uses.

First costs, or capital costs, for energy efficiency strategies in office buildings are often a primary barrier to realizing high-performance buildings with 50% or greater energy savings. Historically, the industry has been unable to reach deep energy savings because of a reliance on energy cost savings and simple payback analysis alone to justify investments. A more comprehensive and integrated cost justification and capital cost control approach is needed. By implementing innovative procurement and delivery strategies, integrated design principles and cost tradeoffs, life cycle cost justifications, and streamlined construction methods, first cost barriers can be overcome. It is now possible to attain marketable, high-performance office buildings that achieve LEED Platinum and reach net zero energy goals at competitive whole building first costs, as illustrated by the U.S. Department of Energy’s and National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s latest high-performance office building, the Research Support Facility (RSF) on the National Renewable Energy Laboratory campus in Golden, Colorado.