The Building Technologies Program
Mission Statement and Focus Areas
PROGRAM MISSION: In alignment with the FAS mission of promoting positive change through science and technology, the Building Technologies Program works to mitigate climate change and advance the notions of social justice and environmental responsibility within the building industry.
Buildings are the leading consumer of electricity and energy in our country, and energy production and use are responsible for 85 percent of human greenhouse gasses. With this in mind, the main focus of FAS’s work is to improve energy efficiency and reduce the environmental impact of buildings, while simultaneously improving affordability and life safety. In addition, FAS will work to better understand the relationships between technologies and needs and behavior of a building’s occupants, recognizing that solving climate change and sustainability issues is about not just a technological fix, but human and behavioral changes. To this end the Building Technologies Program will focus work on the following areas.
- Policy: Support policy that promotes the adoption and widespread market penetration of advanced building technologies, especially as related to the standardization of codes, metrics, and standards internationally and nationally.
- Education: Educate and perform outreach relating to advanced technologies that both increase energy efficiency and are cost effective. The goal is not to make technological preferences, but to promote a holistic vision of energy efficiency that takes into consideration the comfort, safety, and cost effectiveness of the building; the primary objective of educational efforts is to lower barriers to the adoption of advanced technologies and energy efficiency.
- Tools: In order to facilitate the adoption of advanced technologies, and enable educated decision making, create tools and toolkits to assist in improving understanding of energy efficiency and high performance housing issues and which are intuitive, simple, and useful for industry professionals, scientists, and the public.
- Partnerships: Partner with groups that build demonstration projects and use our scientific and technical expertise to contribute to the analysis of high performance housing issues and issues discovered through demonstration experimentation and to find solutions that are cost effective and useful.
FAS works to create strategically optimized solutions within these categories through academic, professional, and industry partnerships to have a real and positive effect on the global impact of our built environment.