I’m not sure, but the US Federal Government just awarded $129M to Penn State and a mixed group of Mid-Atlantic universities and organizations to develop one at the old Philadelphia Navy Yards. The consortium applying for the grant with Penn State included Princeton, Rutgers, the University of Pennsylvania, Drexel and other institutions. Apparently Gov Rendell helped win the grant by promising $30M of PA state money to the project.

Henry Foley, who leads the Penn State research team said the project will focus on creating more energy efficient buildings and training workers to both retrofit and do new construction in the efficient ways, as noted in a recent ENR article.

The US Department of Energy sent out the following news release. “The Energy Innovation Hubs are a key part of our effort to harness the power of American ingenuity to achieve transformative energy breakthroughs,” said Secretary Chu. “By bringing together some of our brightest minds, we can develop cutting-edge building energy efficiency technologies that will reduce energy bills, cut carbon pollution, and create jobs. This important investment will help Philadelphia become a leader in the global clean energy economy.”

The location is local for us and it’s nice to win, but I’ve got concerns about the effectiveness of this spending. All of us involved in the design and construction of buildings know how to create more energy efficient buildings. The problem isn’t the knowledge but the demand for the product. Owners don’t normally want to pay for extra building costs that have a payback beyond three or four years. Energy remains relatively cheap, so most of the things we could do, we don’t due because Owners don’t want to waste their money.

Any Owner that wants to save building energy beyond the normal will find willing and talented engineers and contractors to help him spend his money. Grants like this are like pushing a rope.

Let me tell you a story about my friend Bob Navitski and the Philadelphia Navy Yards. Bob was a young engineer, working in the field as an inspector at the Navy Yard with a contractor’s pipe crew. He told the crew there was a sanitary line crossing their proposed storm sewer run and the crew dug all day trying to find that elusive sanitary line. Eventually Bob realized that he was working from an old set of prints and what he thought was a sanitary line was actually a crinkle on the drawing sheet. Bob laughingly remembers that the pipe crew wasted an entire day searching for a crinkle. We all make mistakes like that when we’re young (and, I’m finding, when we’re old too.)

I just hope this $129M federal grant doesn’t produce the same kind of result.