PNNL

The Advanced Building Construction (ABC) Initiative accelerates the speed and scale of U.S. building decarbonization through industrialized innovations that deliver low carbon, affordable, and appealing new buildings and retrofits. Industrialization refers to streamlining manufacturing, business models, and installation of technologies to become reproducible at scale. To do this, the ABC Initiative provides support to accelerate innovations coming out of RD&D through commercialization and scaling, all informed by market needs.

ABC Innovations are:

• High performance — Reducing energy use and the carbon footprint of buildings
• Affordable to developers and consumers
• Enhancing standards of traditional construction while being less invasive
• Providers of added value, such as better indoor air quality, improved comfort, increased resilience, and reduced maintenance

What needs does the ABC Initiative address?

The ABC Initiative is designed to tackle critical issues related to the U.S. building stock’s:

• Consumption of 75% of the country’s electricity and 40% of its total energy
• Contribution of 35% of national CO2 emissions
• Inadequate or unstable housing for nearly 600,000 people

What is the solution?

New, more industrialized, replicable, and technologically driven approaches and innovations are imperative to achieve the necessary speed and scale to meet national building decarbonization goals.

To meet these goals, these innovations not only need to be applied to new construction but to 80% of the existing building stock by 2050. This requires speeding up the retrofit rate 15 times for residential buildings and doubling the rate for commercial buildings.

Introducing the ABC Research Opportunities Report

The ABC Research Opportunities Report specifically focuses on and prioritizes innovations that support the industrialization of low-carbon retrofits and new construction solutions.

The innovations are grouped into these categories:

The primary challenge addressed in this roadmap is the pace of high-performance, low-carbon building retrofits and new construction in the U.S. needed to meet 2050 decarbonization goals. This roadmap identifies innovations necessary to drive progress in the market and helps prioritize and guide RD&D, scaling, and overall investments in disruptive integrated solutions and processes. These innovations address specific gaps to improve speed and scale of today’s construction and renovation processes. For every innovation, the roadmap identifies the current innovation state, goals for each innovation, and the technical, market, and workforce-related challenges and needs.

Innovation Priorities

Primary innovations are those that directly support the near-term goals associated with industrializing or streamlining building envelope upgrades and beneficial electrification for both renovations and new construction.

Innovation Information

Each primary innovation in the report has the same information organized into Technology Outlook and Innovation Needs tables. Public and private industry stakeholders can use these tables to identify specific steps forward for each innovation, as well as barriers that need to be addressed for successful implementation and scaling.

Enabling Innovations

The ABC Research Opportunities Report also provides a substantial amount of information related to enabling innovations. These are innovations in design, materials, production, and installation assistance that could be used in combination with each other to support the development and deployment of primary innovations.

Next Steps

As this ABC Research Opportunities Report will provide context for investment through 2035, it is imperative that it is periodically updated to reflect lessons learned, expert and stakeholder input, and technological and market changes that impact the innovation status and cost targets. It is considered a living document and open for feedback by emailing Industrialized.Opportunities@pnnl.gov.