The General Services Administration’s (GSA’s) Green Proving Ground program announced a new request for information (RFI) on August 1, 2024. The program is being conducted in collaboration with the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Building Technologies Office (BTO) and is focused on enabling energy efficiency and decarbonization in commercial buildings, contributing to a more efficient electric infrastructure, and improving resiliency and occupant health. GSA’s Green Proving Ground (GPG) program makes private and public sector commercial buildings available to building science practitioners to validate promising building technologies in real-world buildings. Test sites available through this program include GSA’s extensive real estate portfolio and the buildings of DOE’s Better Buildings partners, including over 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 its installation and evaluation. These “proving grounds” give DOE’s national laboratory experts an opportunity to evaluate the technical and operational characteristics of mature, but not widely deployed, building technologies in real-world buildings. Through its Commercial Buildings Integration (CBI) program, BTO then shares lessons learned from these tests with its extensive network of buildings industry stakeholders that could install them 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 throughout GSA’s real estate portfolio to 54. Since 2011, the GPG program has evaluated 107 technologies, 23 of which have been deployed across more than a third of GSA’s federally owned portfolio. Each year, these GPG technologies avoid the emission of 116,000 tons of carbon dioxide and save the government $28 million.
This year’s RFI is seeking emerging and sustainable technologies that should be right in the wheelhouse of many Passive House practitioners. They will support:
Deep energy retrofits.
All-electric buildings and all-electric vehicle fleets.
Healthy and resilient buildings.
Building materials with low embodied carbon.
Net-zero emission operations.
Packages of emerging and sustainable technology solutions.
The RFI is 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 can review the RFI on sam.gov, available directly at Solicitation #FY25RFI080124 (here). Please direct any inquiries regarding the RFI to [email protected].