JE Dunn Construction and SmithGroup Break Ground on NREL’s New Facility to Accelerate Lab-scale Innovations for Scale-up and Industry Adoption

JE Dunn Construction, with its design partner, SmithGroup, broke ground today on the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) new Energy Materials and Processing at Scale (EMAPS) facility on the east side of its South Table Mountain Campus in Golden, Colorado. The 127,000-square-foot laboratory will be a signature facility that will enable collaboration with industry partners, universities, and other DOE laboratories to accelerate laboratory scale innovations in energy materials to market-ready products and processes.

The new research facility will be completed in 2027.

“We are excited to be on our way to building our new EMAPS facility,” said NREL Director Martin Keller. “The new capabilities we will gain from EMAPS will accelerate innovations in materials and processes that are essential to clean energy technologies, from lab-scale discovery to scale-up for commercialization, allowing NREL to dig deeper into our current research while also pursuing exciting new avenues.”

“The groundbreaking of the new EMAPS facility marks a significant milestone in our ongoing partnership with the NREL,” said JE Dunn Project Director, Charlie Slattery. “It represents the culmination of extensive collaboration and hard work from a dedicated team of stakeholders to make such a complex and innovative project a reality."

EMAPS will create a direct path from bench-scale materials and process innovations to pilot-scale integration and production. The laboratory design will facilitate a multidisciplinary approach to materials R&D by providing opportunities for engineers, scientists, and industry partners to work together in shared laboratory facilities to greatly accelerate process scale-up and market adoption of the advanced energy materials needed for a clean energy transition. It will serve to maximize collaboration, facilitate cross-functional innovation, and accelerate discoveries to market-relevant technology solutions. The building’s research capabilities and applications will enable materials and process innovations in energy storage, advanced manufacturing, technologies for grid modernization, sustainable chemicals and fuels for transportation and industrial applications. The facility will also address end of life and circularity challenges across multiple energy technology platforms with a focus on polymers, packaging, and waste streams during and after production. The total budget for the EMAPS project is $224 million.

The incorporation of advanced sustainability strategies and innovative energy efficiency approaches are critical project factors. EMAPS is intended to achieve a minimum of LEED^TM Gold certification with a sustainable, high-performance design, in addition to advanced energy efficiency approaches such as reclaimed gray water, building heat reclaim technologies and the use of electricity in lieu of natural gas to support campus decarbonization efforts.  

“The EMAPS facility will set a new benchmark in sustainable research. Building on groundbreaking discoveries occurring on the renowned NREL campus in a laboratory environment with exceptional flexibility, innovative researchers will collaborate and convert their work into tangible, real-world solutions,” said Will McCrory, Design Principal at SmithGroup. “As we celebrate this development milestone with our longstanding partners at NREL and JE Dunn, we look forward to EMAPS embodying NREL’s mission as a high-performance, sustainable lab that inspires and engages researchers."

The building is being designed to have modern, open, and flexible spaces that accommodate rapid experiment configuration and encourage collaboration among researchers. The general principle is to provide laboratory capabilities in a single facility that allow researchers and engineers to collaborate in a multidisciplinary setting.

NREL is the U.S. Department of Energy's primary national laboratory for renewable energy and energy efficiency research and development. NREL is operated for the Energy Department by the Alliance for Sustainable Energy, LLC.