The Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory selected JE Dunn Construction to design and build a new $224 million research facility on the east side of its South Table Mountain Campus in Golden, Colorado, according to a news release.
The Kansas City, Missouri-based general contractor expects to break ground in late 2024, according to the NREL. The design for the 127,000-square-foot facility will feature modern, open and flexible spaces, and will accommodate rapid experiment configuration and collaboration between researchers. JE Dunn anticipates the facility to achieve a minimum of LEED Gold certification with a sustainable, high-performance design.
The contractor, along with its design partner SmithGroup, a Detroit-based architecture and planning firm, will design the space to allow for reconfigurability and flexibility as new insights and needs arise, according to the release. In other words, the design of the facility will help different kinds of experts, like engineers, scientists and industry partners, to work together in the same lab.
This teamwork will make it much faster to make advanced materials for clean energy. The design is meant to make collaboration better, encourage new ideas from different areas and speed up the process of turning discoveries into practical technology solutions for the market, according to the release.
JE Dunn and SmithGroup previously partnered with NREL 10 years ago to complete the Energy Systems Integration Facility. The project consisted of a 180,000-square-foot research facility building also on the South Table Mountain Campus directly adjacent to this $224 million project. NREL is the Department of Energy’s primary national laboratory for renewable energy and energy efficiency research and development.