Home of the Future could Make Homeowners Money while Producing Clean Energy

The 234-year-old Philadelphia Navy Yard—which has morphed from defunct naval shipyard to bustling business district—is going through yet another metamorphosis: into an energy-efficient campus.

State and federal officials decided that the 200 office buildings—a mix of historic and new structures occupied by organizations from the Department of Defense to Urban Outfitters—and the fact that is runs on its own electrical “micro-grid” make it the perfect environment to test out innovative energy-saving technologies.

Energy Secretary Steven Chu spoke there Monday afternoon to announce an additional $7 million being awarded to the project, which received $122 million in federal funding in August after being named a U.S. Department of Energy “Energy Innovation Hub.”

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“The idea is not to make energy-efficient buildings that would showcase buildings. The idea is to make buildings that could make lots of money,” Chu said during an event at the Navy Yard. “Those investments in energy savings would result in money savings so that these things would be wildly profitable.”

A research consortium led by Penn State University will use the shipyard, which has 1,200 acres and over 7,500 employees at 80 businesses working off an independent grid, as a testing ground for new energy-efficient building technologies and practices.

The consortium will also train workers on retrofitting and construction, in an effort to create green jobs in the Philadelphia area.

Applied Physics

Before visiting the Navy Yard, Chu spent the morning touring solar-energy start up Applied Photovoltaics in Pennington, N.J., and the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) in Princeton, N.J.

PPPL is part of the Navy Yard consortium and will receive $1.2 million over five years to lead the Hub’s education and workforce development task on energy-efficient building practices.

Applied Photovoltaics, which received a $1.1 million 48C manufacturing tax credit under the Recovery Act, will soon start manufacturing solar energy modules for use in building-integrated photovoltaics (BIPV). BIPV are building materials used in construction that can generate energy by absorbing the sun’s power.

The company hopes to begin producing BIPV at its Ewing, N.J., facility by next year. “What we’re trying to do is build a manufacturing line to cater to one of the largest areas of growth in the solar industry,” owner Jeff Szczepanski told Energy Empowers in April. “This is a tremendous opportunity to set up a line where we create American jobs and projects that hit the sweet spot of architects looking for renewable energy solutions.”

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Posted by Tracey A. Smith on Sep 29 2010. Filed under Lower Your Energy Bills, Residential Solar, Residential Solar. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry