NREL's Campus Construction Projects

We're enhancing our campuses with new facilities and collaborations to advance research in energy efficiency, sustainable transportation, renewable power technologies, and energy systems integration to create a clean energy future.

Our construction and renovation projects will enable more cross-disciplinary research and partnership opportunities and new ways to scale up global technologies for the marketplace.

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Construction Impacts

Aerial view of a series of modular buildings set against a mountain backdrop.

Concept design rendering of the Energy Materials and Processing at Scale facility, due north (right) of the solar arrays above the Visitor Parking Lot on NREL's Golden, Colorado, campus. Rendering from SmithGroup

Drone view of a series of buildings with mountains in the background.

Buildings on the South Table Mountain Energy Park site.

NREL's Energy Materials and Processing at Scale facility—to be located on the east end of the laboratory's Golden, Colorado, campus—will be a 127,000-ft² signature facility that rapidly minimizes barriers to scaling up new energy, materials, devices, and processes. 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.

JE Dunn Construction was selected, in partnership with SmithGroup, as the design-build team for the facility. Construction is anticipated to begin in late 2024 and be complete in 2027.

In January 2023, the U.S. Department of Energy took possession of a section of Camp George West—a former military base just south of NREL's Golden, Colorado, campus—making the space a new NREL-managed resource known as the South Table Mountain Energy Park (STEP).

STEP will be a hub for startups, entrepreneurs, and new innovations to help move the latest research and products closer to commercialization.

NREL is working closely with the Colorado State Historic Preservation Office on a forthcoming STEP campus master plan that will outline short-, mid-, and long-term developments.