The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is putting the finishing touches on a net-zero-energy demonstration home that the federal agency hopes will identify green and energy-efficient strategies that transfer well to the real world.
“We saw the need for a test bed for new energy-efficient technologies, and we saw it as a way to demonstrate that it is possible to build a house that, over the course of a year, will generate as much energy as it uses,” says Hunter Fanney, chief of the Engineering Laboratory at NIST’s building environment division. “We also wanted to show that a house like that could be designed to fit into a typical suburban neighborhood and look like any other house on the block.”