WD Partners Announces Contract with Pacific Northwest National Laboratory to Develop a High-Performance Retail Building for The Home Depot through the Commercial Building Partnership

COLUMBUS, Ohio, Dec. 14, 2010 /PRNewswire/ -- WD Partners, a customer experience expert for food and retail brands, announces it has signed a multi-year contract with Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) to develop a high performance Home Depot store in California through the Department of Energy's Commercial Building Partnership (CBP). CBP projects put cutting-edge building techniques and technologies on the fast-track to wide-spread commercial use.

The team will design and construct an energy efficient Home Depot prototype store that will require up to 50% less energy than American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE)/Illuminating Engineering Society of North America (IESNA) Standard 90.1-2007 compliant buildings. The project is funded through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

CBP strives to develop high-performance, market-ready building solutions that can be widely deployed and adopted as standard practice throughout the commercial building sector.  Projects allow companies to explore design alternatives that may be too technologically challenging or expensive to consider without the technical expertise of the DOE-funded national laboratories.

WD Partners has collaborated with The Home Depot for more than eight years to improve the efficiency and performance of their stores, including utilizing other regional programs that incentivize energy savings, such as Austin Energy Green Building and Savings by Design.  

WD Partners helps multi-unit food and retail brands innovate through strategy, design, architecture, engineering, and implementation services. The company was founded as an architecture and engineering firm in 1968, and has expanded its services to include branding, digital, and consumer research. Please visit wdpartners.com.  

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory is a Department of Energy Office of Science national laboratory where interdisciplinary teams advance science and technology and deliver solutions to America's most intractable problems in energy, the environment and national security. PNNL employs 4,900 staff, has an annual budget of nearly $1.1 billion, and has been managed by Ohio-based Battelle since the lab's inception in 1965.

Commercial Building Partnerships (CBP) is a U.S. Department of Energy initiative that engages commercial businesses interested in pursuing the development of very high efficiency buildings. The program's objective is to accelerate market adoption of currently available and near-ready energy saving technologies into standard design practice for commercial buildings to attain a high level of performance. For additional information, please visit the DOE Building Technologies Program web site at www.eere.energy.gov/buildings.

SOURCE WD Partners