Dedicated to advancing sustainable laboratories globally.
E1 System Optimization | Getting EUI Under Control
Taking Lab Energy Calculations to the Next Level: Controls Fixes
It is well known that the performance of lab building controls degrades over time and that addressing these issues is not only critical for maintaining proper building operation, but also typically results in reduced energy consumption. Further, energy projects in lab facilities must expect to repair controls dysfunction during implementation; otherwise, the anticipated cost savings may not be achieved. Traditional energy modeling, including the first version of I2SL's AIM Report automated energy auditing software, do not account for controls dysfunction and do not display recommissioning measures alongside more traditional energy retrofits. This presentation describes I2SL's framework for adding controls dysfunction to the AIM calculation engine, in order to present a more accurate picture of the origin of potential energy savings in lab facilities and to aid stakeholders in building the business case for recommissioning and monitoring-based commissioning efforts. The presentation will cover the technical aspects of the framework for savings calculations and implementation costs, and will include some examples using real buildings. Potential improvements to the methodology will also be discussed. The discussion will also include some parallels between the commissioning process for building control systems and medium-scale software projects.
Implementing Laboratory Exhaust Fan Turndown From Easy to Easier, With Safety and Control as Top Priority
Laboratory ventilation and exhaust systems are becoming more and more complex as labs strive for increased ventilation effectiveness, safer work environments, and greater energy efficiency. Unfortunately, it is a natural reaction to revert to the familiar and comfortable ways of doing business when befuddled by new technology. Implementing VAV controls into laboratory exhaust systems does not have to be complex; a VAV exhaust system may be cheaper to implement, easier to design and operate, more resilient, and more energy-efficient than a traditional constant volume system that uses bypass dampers. This presentation will show just how straightforward these systems are with just a basic understanding of how they are designed to operate and what labs need to do to keep them operating safely.
Layer Up and Turn Down
UC San Francisco (UCSF) Facilities and UC Berkeley (UCB) Center for the Built Environment (CBE) collaborated on a temperature setback program (Layer Up for Science), implemented in June 2025. This effort built on UCSF programs to reduce ventilation based on holidays, occupancy, and load reduction to demand response events, starting in October 2024. These measures facilitated rapid development of a plan to change from 70-74°F to 68-75°F, yielding a very low capital approach to reduce energy use and associated emissions. UCSF used the Setpoint Energy Savings Calculator to estimate savings, developed a plan, and reviewed with stakeholders and leadership. The team was directed to start quickly and took measures to speed up the plan. Lab, office, and common spaces were included; clinical and critical lab spaces were excluded. The first phase included eight buildings, totaling 1,246,000 square feet. Lessons were applied to Phase 2 buildings comprising 598,000 square feet. Fan schedules were reduced and demand response and holiday curtailments continued, concurrent with a staff return-to-site mandate. Comfort was prioritized, complaints led to fixing deficiencies, the community was educated, and personal cooling devices were handed out by request. A measurement and validation model demonstrates significant gas and electricity savings at a low cost.
E2 Sustainable Design | Specifying Sustainable Materials
Health and Wellbeing
What does it take to translate global ESG ambition into meaningful laboratory design? This session explores how AstraZeneca advances Ambition Zero Carbon, supply chain decarbonization, and inclusive employee experience commitments across its global portfolio through governance structures, internal review committees, standardized tools, and third-party certification frameworks such as BREEAM, LEED, and WELL. Using AstraZeneca's Kendall Square facility as a case study, speakers trace how early goal setting, equity and inclusion workshops, and sustainability and wellness charrettes shaped measurable project outcomes. They will examine how WELL strategies, biophilic design, neuroinclusive planning principles, and smart building sensors were integrated not as add-ons, but as drivers of design excellence, occupant wellbeing, and operational performance. The presentation also addresses how policy, programming, and staffing models reinforce design intent, ensuring that sustainability and equity extend beyond project delivery into daily operations. Attendees will gain a strategic framework for aligning decarbonization, health, and inclusion goals with certification pathways and long-term lab performance—demonstrating how integrated design leadership can elevate both environmental impact and human experience in high-performance laboratory environments.
Innovations in Lab Design: A Case Study in Wellbeing
Pharmaceutical research is dedicated to improving patient health; shouldn't their laboratories also be designed with building materials, planning, and management that supports occupant wellbeing too? Learn how one large research facility in Cambridge is pushing the boundaries of wellness at scale. See firsthand how the project team balanced wellness features while also considering building performance, embodied carbon, and the demands of this complex program type. The presentation will review new (and old) technologies that are being holistically used through thoughtful programming, full-scale mock-ups, and a cloud-based database to research over 3,000 building products across disciplines. Speakers will dive deep into material selection and show how the team assessed products, evaluated health product declarations, and even expanded the use of natural materials into the lab environment. Further, active design features, testing, monitoring, and building management principles will be surveyed to demonstrate techniques for improving occupant wellbeing long after construction is complete. Consistent and ongoing advocacy can influence and support manufacturers in their efforts to provide your projects with sustainable and healthy materials.
Commitment and Effort: Achieving Sustainability Goals in Pre-Clinical Manufacturing
To provide life-changing medicines, pharmaceutical manufacturing laboratories require technically complex research and process development spaces. The operational needs of these laboratories can create significant challenges when designing an environmentally sustainable, wellness-promoting building environment. In this session, presenters will explore how a pre-clinical manufacturing project overcame these challenges to achieve several sustainability objectives. Driven by corporate goals and researchers' commitment to green labs, the project aimed for enhanced occupant wellness, resilience, and energy/emissions reduction. Unconventional strategies were implemented to accomplish these targets, including human-centric campus planning, biophilic design, indoor air quality testing, electrochromic glazing, and heat pump chillers for heat recovery. Speakers will focus on the design, construction, and operational lessons learned when implementing sustainable strategies in a technologically complex manufacturing environment.
E3 Decarbonization | Hot Takes on Heat Pumps
Do Heat Pumps Dream of Electric Boilers? Electrifying a Lab Building: Controls Insights From Roux Institute Alfond Center
As labs pursue electrification and aggressive decarbonization goals, heat pump–based HVAC systems are reshaping how lab buildings are designed, sized, and controlled. High ventilation rates, stringent safety requirements, variable internal loads, and cold climate operation create unique challenges for applying heat pumps in lab environments. This presentation explores how the transition to heat pumps impacts laboratory HVAC design and control strategies and examines best practices for right-sizing heat pump capacity to meet peak laboratory loads while avoiding oversizing and unnecessary floor area impacts. It addresses how all-electric systems can be balanced with supplemental heat sources to ensure cold weather resiliency, reliability, and safety without compromising affordability. The discussion includes selecting and integrating appropriate technologies such as air and ground source heat pumps, energy recovery, thermal storage, and existing central plants. A key focus is advanced control strategies to optimize heat pump performance across varying outdoor conditions. Topics include simultaneous heating and cooling, improving staging and turndown, compressor staging, and predictive or hybrid control approaches. The Roux Institute Alfond Center in Portland, Maine, demonstrates how these strategies can deliver safe, reliable, and floor area efficient, all-electric lab buildings that support long-term decarbonization goals.
​What Type of Heat Pump Is Right for Your Lab? Designing and Operating Cost Effective, Fully Electrified Laboratory Buildings
Heat pumps are a critical strategy for decarbonizing laboratory buildings, particularly in cold climates where heating loads are high, and traditional air-source heat pumps struggle to fully electrify systems due to low temperature limitations. This session explores how selecting and integrating the right combination of heat pump technologies—including exhaust-source, air-source, and ground-source systems—can enable cost‑effective, fully electrified laboratory operation while maintaining performance and resilience.
A central focus is the rapidly growing role of exhaust-source heat pumps (ESHPs) in lab electrification: how ESHPs work, where they provide the greatest value, and design factors that influence efficiency and reliability. Major exhaust energy recovery strategies—including chilled‑water coils, glycol runaround systems, coil configurations, and DX‑based solutions—are compared, with discussion of frosting behavior, lift requirements, controls integration, and opportunities for cascading and thermal export. Speakers will share measured data for the first lab using an ESHP designed for controlled exhaust coil frosting, where the boilers stayed off in winter, and details of a humidified Canadian lab designed for full electrification to -17°F.
Emphasis is placed on project‑specific decision making, showing when ESHPs are the best solution, and when alternate strategies may be more appropriate. The session concludes with practical guidance on early construction involvement, commissioning, and verification strategies to ensure electrified laboratory buildings perform as intended.
Labs Are Decarbonization's Best Friend: How to Electrify Existing Labs and Leverage New Labs to Electrify Existing Campuses
Universities pursuing climate commitments are moving beyond isolated high‑performance buildings toward coordinated, campus‑scale decarbonization strategies. Concurrently, the rapid evolution of building electrification has reshaped how complex facilities such as laboratories are designed, renovated, and operated. This presentation unites campus‑scale planning with building‑level electrification lessons to demonstrate how institutions can translate decarbonization goals into actionable strategies and how lab buildings can go from the worst energy offender to net positive when exporting across a campus.
Speakers will share the University of Rhode Island’s Kingston Campus decarbonization analysis, which evaluated precinct‑based electrification as a pathway to eliminate fossil‑fuel thermal systems while maintaining operational resilience. The study assessed legacy steam infrastructure, building thermal loads, and distribution constraints with a geothermal feasibility analysis. Calibrated energy models of representative campus buildings, including high‑intensity lab facilities, were used to evaluate multiple electrification scenarios incorporating planned renovations and future growth outlined in the campus master plan. Scenarios were compared using emissions performance; utility and life‑cycle cost; spatial constraints; and infrastructure compatibility.
In parallel, the presentation explores when and where to use geothermal, air-source, or exhaust-source heat pumps based on specific project criteria. A phased implementation roadmap highlights lessons learned related to sequencing, stakeholder engagement, and decision‑making under uncertainty, offering transferable insights for institutions pursuing resilient, cost‑effective campus decarbonization.
E4 Sustainable Science | Sharing and Reusing Equipment
University of Colorado Boulder Green Labs Shared Equipment Core and Potential for Increased Sharing
Creating core facilities that share resources beyond very sophisticated categories of equipment are often overlooked, especially at well-funded institutions. Basic equipment is duplicated repeatedly in individual labs, while lab spaces often become storage areas as the research foci of individual lab groups shift and equipment needs change. With the present uncertainty in U.S. federal research funding levels and the impacts of climate change becoming increasingly serious and disruptive, there is a need for efficiency in the way that scientific research is conducted. Shared instrumentation facilities (cores) significantly reduce overall spending on scientific equipment by eliminating redundancy, and simultaneously provide expertise in equipment usage and maintenance that reduces the burden on research groups. Cores contribute to efficient use of lab space; one of the most expensive and energy-intensive spaces on a campus. The Green Labs Shared Equipment Core at the University of Colorado Boulder seeks to create a campus-wide network of shared low- to mid-cost equipment that supports both research and educational labs. Green Labs previously piloted a program in collaboration with three departments, which achieved over $3 million in avoided costs and provided hundreds of researchers and students with access to basic equipment. The current program is expanding this model across campus to establish collaborations with various departments in multiple colleges.
Addressing Lab Waste by Integrating Lab Clean-Ups With Student-Led Supply Rehoming Efforts
Caltech Green Labs began a lab spring cleaning program in 2023, where labs would provide before and after pictures of their clean ups and Green Labs provided a pizza party to celebrate. Since implementation, this program has developed resources to encourage safe and sustainable lab clean-ups and more than 20 labs have utilized these resources to clean their spaces. These clean-up efforts often uncover unneeded but valuable lab supplies and equipment that proved difficult to rehome. Thus, in mid-2025 Green Labs launched an online platform that enabled labs to advertise and rehome $70,000 worth of items. Building upon this success, Green Labs then secured a small physical space to create a Lab ReStore, reclaiming unused shelving units from animal facilities and hiring three students to work in the ReStore a few hours a week. During this time, they began doing clean-outs of abandoned or soon-to-be-closed lab spaces and rehoming items in the Lab ReStore. Student interns helped to clean out labs and then categorize, weigh, and price out each item to track waste- and cost-diversion efforts. In addition, students worked directly with campus users to help them find items and update an inventory database. Furthermore, the ReStore serves as a sustainability hub on campus, as it can be used for events, a place for Green Labs Interns to work, and a community outreach location.
From Abandoned Junk to a Treasure Trove of Sustainable Mysteries
At institutions with numerous research buildings, there is always renovation and shifting of labs. For universities that have very old buildings, a lot of these labs can be out of service and filled to the brim with working equipment, non-working equipment, and random scrap, being used as storage space. These labs have had years and multiple PIs' worth of items they don't want to dispose. When it's time to renovate the space or move buildings, these out-of-service labs are hidden areas of reuse and recycling potential. UAB Green Labs conducted a pilot on identifying out of service lab space and worked to reuse and recycle items to help divert trash from the landfill. In this project, two different buildings had areas due for renovation that were identified, and rooms sorted through to find items to be reused/unique ways to dispose of what would otherwise be trash. Green Labs identified a way to identify which stakeholders need to be involved and was able to recover over $80,000 in reuse potential from one large lab that had moved to a different building. Both labs were completely different departments and showed the complexity involved in working with multiple research disciplines. This process can easily be replicated at universities across the nation.
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