Center for the Built Environment

Presented at the CEC EPRI Electrification Summit on June 10, 2026, this poster describes an ongoing California Energy Commission-funded research initiative (Grant Award #EPC-23-032) led by the California Institute for Energy and Environment (CIEE) and the Center for the Built Environment (CBE) at the University of California, Berkeley, which aims to provide a cost-effective pathway to substantially reduce carbon emissions from large commercial buildings through heat pumps and thermal storage, with key project components including the demonstration of a large, new heat recovery chiller using an ultra-low GWP refrigerant (R-1234ze, GWP=1, zero ozone depletion) at the Kaiser Permanente South San Francisco Medical Center — where the system is designed to provide chilled water while simultaneously rejecting heat at 140–170°F for building heating at a combined COP as high as 6.7 and cover greater than 50% of the annual heating load — alongside data-driven analysis of operating data collected from 37 buildings with all-electric heating and cooling plants, advanced model-based simulations of heating and cooling plant configurations and control strategies using Modelica, and multi-faceted market transformation activities including stakeholder interviews, a simplified web-based design tool, a list of electrical equipment, a guide on refrigerants, case studies, a commercial building electrification map, a large commercial building decarbonization design guide, and a policy recommendations memo.