Therese Peffer, associate director of the CITRIS Climate initiative and the California Institute for Energy and Environment (CIEE), and colleagues at the UC Berkeley Center for the Built Environment (CBE), have been awarded two major grants to advance research on commercial building decarbonization.
The two awards, totaling approximately $8 million, are part of a nearly $20 million investment by the California Energy Commission (CEC) to fund decarbonization solutions for heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) systems in large commercial buildings.
The larger grant, totaling roughly $6 million and led by Paul Raftery with Peffer as co-primary investigator (PI), aims to demonstrate how hospitals can reduce carbon emissions through heat recovery chiller retrofits. The second grant, totaling roughly $2 million and led by Peffer with co-PI Hui Zhang, will advance the widespread adoption of personal comfort devices (PCDs) in commercial buildings to improve indoor comfort.
“These awards offer the opportunity to accelerate the decarbonization of large commercial buildings in very different ways,” said Peffer. “I am excited to work with talented, multidisciplinary teams to advance California’s climate goals.”