American small businesses received a near-$44 million boost from the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program. Five buildings-focused, Phase II Release 2 grants awarded approximately $5 million to five small businesses. The projects, which are making advancements in building envelopes, building energy modeling, and lighting, have already demonstrated a level of commercial feasibility for further innovations in the second phase of research. The five projects:
 
• Lightweight and Thermally Insulating Nanowood – (Inventwood LLC., College Park, MD)
Inventwood LLC is using delignified wood to create a new, bio-derived cellulose thermal insulation material that could be used in window frames, exterior insulating cladding, or prefabricated panels for new building construction or retrofit applications.
 
• Printed Anodes and Internal Light Extraction Layers on Flexible Glass to Create Cost-Effective High-Efficacy Bendable OLED Lighting Panels – (OLEDWorks LLC, Rochester, NY)
OLEDWorks LLC will further develop and commercialize a highly energy-efficient lighting product in the form of uniquely thin and beautiful curved sheets of light to accelerate organic light-emitting diode (OLED) market growth. If all Phase II goals are met, the size of the lighting market available to OLED luminaire manufacturers could increase significantly from the high-end niche market of today to mainstream commercial and consumer markets.
 
• High Performance Substrate Embedded Microgrids for High-Efficiency, Flexible Organic Light-Emitting Diodes – (Electroninks Inc, Austin, TX)
Electroninks Inc. is developing an alternative, transparent conductor for optical-electronic applications like touch sensors, displays, and OLEDs that significantly outperforms today’s indium, tin, and oxygen (ITO) conductors. By using a new metal patterning technique that prints high-performance metal grids directly into glass and plastic, these new lattice-shaped “microgrid” conductors could outperform the manufacturing cost and performance of ITO.
 
• Portfolio-Level Energy-Efficiency Simulation (PLES) – (Maalka, Brooklyn, NY)
Maalka is extending its customizable framework for energy-efficiency program development and management. The framework leverages the increasing availability of building energy data and DOE’s open-source data standards and platforms and energy analysis tools (EnergyPlus, OpenStudio). The project targets the large and growing energy-efficiency program market of cities, utilities, larger owners, and energy service customers with a focus on supporting a move from individual energy conservation measures to packages and deep retrofits.
 
• CAD-Integrated Web-Based Performance Simulation – (Ladybug Tools LLC, Fairfax, VA)
Ladybug Tools LLC will use DOE’s open-source EnergyPlus and Radiance tools, as well as OpenStudio’s new elastic cloud capabilities, to deliver a greater range of analysis services (and subsequent revenue streams) for architects. Phase I of this project involved creating a working radiance-based daylighting simulation service; Phase II work will focus on energy simulation.