Buildings consume over 40% of our nation’s total energy and over 75% of its electricity. In order to meet carbon reduction goals, our nation needs to reduce the energy use of both new and existing buildings. Argonne’s Building Energy Decision and Technology Research (BEDTR) team is developing new tools and technologies to support the design, construction, operation, and retrofit of more energy efficient buildings that also provide better comfort and indoor environmental quality for occupants.

Argonne’s Climate-Environment team focuses on the impact of human activities, particularly the generation of energy, on the environment from local to global scale. The effect of fossil-fuel combustion on the atmospheric environment has been a long-standing area of activity, including support to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in the 1990s and an emphasis on the problems of China, India, and the rest of Asia. Argonne researchers are using of satellite data to infer ground-based emissions from power plants and other polluting sources.