Data-Driven Decarbonization: Supporting Decision-Making for Buildings and Infrastructure

The Department of Energy (DOE) Buildings Decarbonization Blueprint highlights the need for whole building life cycle assessment (WBLCA) studies to reduce carbon emissions. Despite research interest, using WBLCA in building design is limited due to complexity and data issues. Developing scalable and standardized life cycle inventory (LCI) and WBLCA methods is crucial to inform the adoption of sustainability approaches by product manufacturers and mechanical and electrical (M&E) industries, and it enables comparison of sustainability impacts across products and product life cycle phases. By contextualizing emerging technologies and systems in a whole building context, tradeoffs between operational and embodied energy/carbon and building systems can be fully optimized.

PNNL’s Role

PNNL is exploring workflows that enable comparison of life cycle carbon and other environmental impacts for new and innovative building materials and technologies. These include M&E equipment, building components, and distributed energy resources (DERs; i.e., electric vehicles, on-site solar generation, and battery storage). PNNL has been addressing sustainability data issues by collaborating with key stakeholders in the M&E industries to address existing barriers that hinder manufacturers from creating high-quality, publicly accessible life cycle assessments (LCAs) and by developing WBLCA workflows that provide support across the four DOE Blueprint strategic objectives: increasing building energy efficiency, accelerating on-site emissions reductions, transforming the grid edge, and minimizing embodied life cycle emissions.

This scope of work is funded by the Building Technologies Office (BTO) Emerging Technologies program. The primary focus of this scope of work addresses life cycle sustainability of lighting and electrical equipment by enabling assessment and management of embodied energy, carbon, and other environmental impacts. The term sustainability can have different meanings depending on the context or community. For this project, sustainability means considering the complex aesthetic, technical, visual, and non-visual needs of people, while at the same time equitably benefiting the economy, society, and the environment.

Life Cycle Assessment for Building Technologies

The United States has set the ambitious goal of achieving net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. To achieve this goal, aggressive reductions in building emissions are essential, particularly in residential and commercial sectors, which currently contribute 29 percent of the nation’s total greenhouse gas emissions. Deep decarbonization of the building sector will be achieved through several strategies, including deploying clean energy technologies, enhancing energy efficiency, and reducing the embodied and operational carbon of building materials and systems. To comprehensively understand and quantify the impacts of these strategies, it is necessary to consider their entire life cycle—from raw material extraction to end of life—using the Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment (LCSA) methodology.

LCSA is the evaluation of all environmental, economic, and social impacts (LCA, life cycle assessment, social life cycle assessment) in decision-making to focus on creating more sustainable products and projects throughout their life cycles. It can inform sustainable design, resource optimization, and emission reduction while also sparking discussions about where impacts occur and who is most burdened by them. This provides decision-makers the information they need to make sure that the U.S. building stock and associated clean energy technologies are not only functional but also sustainable. PNNL aims to support DOE’s cross-cutting priorities of equity, affordability, and resilience by promoting open-access and transparent sustainability data, reducing costs for participation in data-driven sustainability, and creating pathways that support whole-building resilience strategies.

PNNL’s Leadership in Buildings and Infrastructure Sustainability

Staff at PNNL include an interdisciplinary group of specialists with an intimate understanding of the policies, practices, and standards that govern the research, development, and deployment of building system technologies. They’re uniquely positioned to apply the principles of life cycle thinking to enable deep decarbonization in the built environment. Drawing from extensive research on building energy efficiency, sustainability, and environmental justice, the team at PNNL is developing tools and methods, such as Life Cycle Inventory (LCI) templates, to facilitate simpler and more accurate sustainability reporting for a wide variety of technologies and sectors, including:

Lighting and luminaires
Small electronics
DERs
M&E systems
Waste streams and building circularity.

View the Work with Us page to learn more and get connected with the team.

Cataloging the Life Cycle of Luminaires and Evaluating Their Environmental Impact

As building decarbonization becomes more urgent, there is a critical need for high-quality sustainability data for lighting and electrical products. There has been a rapid growth of embodied carbon software and methodologies, but they don’t always meet the standards of high-quality data that is required for reliable results. PNNL leverages its extensive expertise and leadership in LCAs and building sustainability to empower lighting industry stakeholders with trusted and reliable data for lighting and electrical products. Our work aims to develop and support more effective, affordable, and comparable pathways for lighting industry stakeholders to participate in the LCA process, whether they are lighting manufacturers, industry organizations, or specifiers.

We have developed and tested our innovative Life Cycle Inventory (LCI) template with lighting industry stakeholders, and it has supported the development of new North American lighting industry Product Category Rules (PCR).

Mechanical and Electrical System Life Cycle Inventory Templates

The building sector needs demonstrated pathways for achieving decarbonization across the spectrum of commercial buildings. To measure these impacts, DOE needs high-quality data for innovative building materials and M&E equipment, as well as standardized workflows for conducting WBLCAs.

PNNL’s M&E LCI template directly addresses high-quality data gaps and the lack of accounting methods. It utilizes existing and enhanced LCA approaches for both products and buildings, aiming to reduce barriers for stakeholders to participate in collecting, assessing, and sharing high-quality, transparent, sustainability data. PNNL’s LCI template approach, which includes digitization and privacy preserving software and integration into the Federal Commons, can reduce barriers for M&E industries interested in conducting LCAs.

Our work aims to develop and support more effective, affordable, and comparable pathways for M&E industry stakeholders to participate in the LCA process, whether they are M&E manufacturers, industry organizations, or specifiers. We have developed and tested our innovative LCI template with industry leaders. Additionally, these templates are poised to support a new North American rooftop unit (RTU) industry PCR. In the future, we plan to continue to fill in LCA and Environmental Product Declarations data gaps for M&E components, as well as small electronics. We hope to align the LCI template with a new North American PCR for RTUs and elevate the LCI template to a web app to support ease of access and privacy-preserved digitized data that supports the development of industry averages.