Supporting NY State’s Low-Carbon Economy

TRC’s Advanced Energy team has won funding to help develop market-ready technologies for decarbonizing buildings.

In 2023, New York’s Governor Kathy Hochul announced the availability of $18 million in funding under the Next Generation Buildings Innovation Challenges for projects that offer advanced building technologies for clean heating, ventilation, and air conditioning systems, building envelopes, and controls. This funding round includes a new challenge area to advance intelligent building control solutions, including the development and commercialization of technologies that manage energy assets and electrical loads that will further enable decarbonization and electrification.  

TRC applied for and was awarded two projects under this round of funding, with work starting in 2024. These projects aim to demonstrate how intelligent load control technology can support electrification strategies for commercial and residential buildings in New York State, and eventually the U.S. market as a whole.   

TRC is proud of this ongoing work to help transform our building stock – which is responsible for more than a third of annual emissions – to become more energy efficient, load flexible, healthy and resilient.

About the NextGen Buildings Innovation Challenges 

The NextGen Buildings Innovation Challenges, administered by the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA), provides support for companies that are developing, commercializing, and demonstrating new technologies that can boost building performance and energy efficiency, and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. With funding over $45 million to date, this program supports innovative technologies including ground source heat pumps, cutting-edge geothermal technologies and novel building envelope solutions in addition to the new focus area of intelligent building control solutions. TRC has successfully delivered three projects on innovative building control solutions under the previous round of the NYSERDA program, and we are excited to continue supporting NYS’s decarbonization efforts through these two new projects. 

Intelligent Building Controls and Open-Source Software in the Commercial Sector 

TRC’s Advanced Energy Research & Consulting team was awarded NextGen funding for a project that will demonstrate how intelligent building controls can be effective solution to reduce HVAC energy use and peak demand. This project aims to address critical gaps in the Small-to-Medium Commercial Building (SMCB) controls market by developing and demonstrating OpenBOS, a collection of innovative, cost-effective and market-ready control solutions utilizing open-source software.  

The research team, led by TRC in partnership with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), will integrate open-source tools and algorithms into the commercial control platforms of three project industry partners: Elexity, Community Energy Labs, and ACE IoT Solutions. During the demonstration stage, these platforms will be tested in the field in multiple buildings, to evaluate their performance. Potential buildings to be tested include the North Syracuse School District and Syracuse University in upstate NY, which have committed to providing demonstration sites.  

Electric Load-Management Technologies for the ≤100-Amp Residential Sector 

The TRC team was also awarded NextGen funding for a project that will demonstrate how controlling home electric loads is an essential part of decarbonization strategies for NY State, specifically in homes with existing electric panels with ≤100-amp capacity. These low power homes, often in disadvantaged and/or hard to reach communities, typically find switching carbon-emitting technologies with electric replacements particularly challenging without load controls.  

This project will show the feasibility of residential load control technology by demonstrating a smart panel retrofit combined with the use of other electric load-management technologies in 100 homes in upstate New York.  

The research team, led by TRC in partnership with SPAN, Halco and LBNL, aims to support commercialization efforts through development and dissemination of an electrification pattern book targeted to the ≤100-amp market, guidance for local authorities to support acceptance of National Electrical Code (NEC) load calculations, and support to New York state’s various efficiency and decarbonization programs to include and embed load mitigation technologies.