On August 5, 2008, David Rogers, the Department of Energy’s Deputy Assistant Secretary for Energy Efficiency, announced DOE’s support for a Zero-Net Energy Commercial Buildings Initiative (CBI). This initiative had been authorized by the Energy Independence and Security Act (EISA) of 2007 as a partnership among DOE, the private sector, national laboratories, and non-governmental organizations. The mission of CBI is to create a coordinated, long-term national strategy for publicprivate collaboration that integrates deployment, demonstration, and innovation to achieve "net-zero-energy" commercial buildings. DOE’s first major step in support of the Initiative is the establishment of a collaborative among five national laboratories to combine their innovative resources and create technology research, validation, and commercialization priorities critical to the success of net-zero energy buildings.

Further major steps will need to follow to allow the Commercial Building Initiative to set full sails. CBI’s mission goes beyond technology market introduction. The provisions in EISA provide CBI with a goal that is in line with the American Institute of Architects 2030 Challenge: transform the commercial buildings sector so that by 2030, new commercial construction in the United States will use net-zero energy. For the pre-2030 building stock, the goal is to achieve net-zero energy by 2050. Netzero energy means that aggressive energy efficiency measures reduce demand to a minimum, while renewable resources fulfill the remaining energy requirements. These goals are for buildings of every type of use—office towers (both client-owned and leased), industrial facilities, shopping malls, hospitals, schools, government facilities and the like.

Much of the technology to build net-zero energy commercial buildings exists today, but is expensive, and requires rare expertise. Moving these technologies and the needed design expertise into the mainstream will require further research and development, financing, as well as closer coordination among the whole range of relevant actors. For instance, it means involving architects, mechanical engineers, lighting engineers as well as specifiers in the building envelope design process.

The federal appropriations have not yet been secured that would allow significant steps toward the close public-private collaboration crucial for CBI to gain momentum. In the meantime, however, DOE and the U.S. General Service Administration are doing their part to dramatic building energy savings through the above-mentioned collaboration among national laboratories and through two newly-formed Offices of High-Performance Green Buildings. These two offices, one for each agency, are headed by David Rogers (DOE) and Kevin Kempschroer (GSA) and seek to find ways to meet EISA’s targets for building energy use reductions.