Grantee Research Project Results
Final Report: A Green Rooftop System for Commercial Buildings with Superior Energy Efficiency
EPA Contract Number: 68HERC20C0001Title: A Green Rooftop System for Commercial Buildings with Superior Energy Efficiency
Investigators: Zhu, Xiqun
Small Business: XIMAX Technologies
EPA Contact: Richards, April
Phase: II
Project Period: November 1, 2019 through October 31, 2021 (Extended to October 31, 2022)
RFA: Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) - Phase II (2019) Recipients Lists
Research Category: SBIR - Green Buildings Materials and Systems , Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR)
Description:
This SBIR Phase II project addresses three technical problems or/and commercial opportunities:
a) By decreasing solar technology/products’ cost and increasing their energy efficiency at the same time, return-of-investment time period, which is about twenty years today for current commercially available solar panel products on the markets, due to low solar panel energy conversion efficiency and high cost, can be reduced drastically to within two years.
b) By significantly improving building energy efficiency of our nation's six million commercial and industrial buildings to save vast majority (targeting 80% depending on the geography locations) of their electricity consumption today, which is equivalent to 2075.8 billion kilo-watt-hours annually.
c) By prolonging the life of commercial and industrial building rooftops considerably to lower building maintenance cost; and at the building rooftop’s end-of-life, re-utilize rooftop materials to prevent waste rooftop materials from going into landfill.
Summary/Accomplishments (Outputs/Outcomes):
This project develops, prototypes and commercializes a Green Rooftop Technology with superior building energy efficiency to significantly reduce energy consumption of our nation’s six million industrial and commercial buildings. Besides, this proposed technology can significantly extend the lifespan of current building rooftop materials to reduce the maintenance costs for all industrial and commercial building owners and property managers. In some situations, this proposed rooftop system could have longer life than the buildings themselves, especially when the rooftop systems are installed some years after the buildings were built and put in use. In such situations, due to its completely modularized structure design, this proposed rooftop system could be disassembled into modules from an end-of-life building rooftop, and reassembled/reused in other buildings. Furthermore, this proposed technology uses totally recyclable materials. So, at the real end of its life, the entire building rooftop system can be disassembled into pieces and a hundred percent recycled. Nothing will go to landfill at the end. This is another major environmental benefit of this proposed system.
Conclusions:
Very importantly, the above-mentioned unparalleled benefits of this proposed technology do not come with high cost. In fact, its cost is lower than current green rooftop technologies in the sense that it can pay itself within two years due to its superior energy efficiency, and its low cost modularized structure design. Users of this technology, including builders, building owners and property managers, etc. will get the money, which they paid for this green rooftop system, back within two years from energy bill savings, maintenance cost reductions, rooftop material life extensions (resulting in lower re-roofing frequency), plus some electricity generation revenues at peak grid hours. In order to keep the system cost low, energy storage is not included. Extra electricity is uploaded to grid instantly. The total domestic market size of this technology can be as large as $197 billion dollars each year, which is equivalent to 1642.3 billion kilo-watt-hours of electricity annually, on top of all the benefits such as reducing our nation's dependency on fossil fuels and cut down both criteria air pollutants and greenhouse gas emissions to protect our environment.
During this Phase II project period, Ximax has extended the functions, features and capabilities of our system to use green-roof generated solar energy to power more building facilities, from lighting, heating, water heating, air-conditioning, to elevators, kitchen stoves, and even parking lot electric vehicle charging stations, etc. As the results, the overall building energy efficiency can be further increased than that we originally proposed.
We have built a working prototype and tried to install on the roof of a small neighborhood convenient store. We have generated a customer system installation and operational control user interface so either customers or our technical supporting personnel can operate the system either locally or remotely through internet. We are so close to our original goal of generating our first revenue from our system sales or service contract, or technical licensing. We narrowly missed this goal at the end of this phase II project. We will continue working on this project until eventually reaching our goal. We will keep trying to attract investment and applying for other research fundings in the future to push this promising technology to the market to contribute to our missions of protecting our environmental and making our earth greener.
SBIR Phase I:
A Green Rooftop System for Commercial Buildings with Superior Energy Efficiency | Final ReportThe perspectives, information and conclusions conveyed in research project abstracts, progress reports, final reports, journal abstracts and journal publications convey the viewpoints of the principal investigator and may not represent the views and policies of ORD and EPA. Conclusions drawn by the principal investigators have not been reviewed by the Agency.