NFRC held its 2022 Fall Membership Meeting from Oct. 24 to 26, at the Catamaran Resort Hotel and Spa in San Diego, California. More than 100 people attended and were treated to a thorough preview of what’s to come in the fenestration industry, ranging from new technologies to the finer points of the new ENERGY STAR® standards from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

NFRC CEO Deb Callahan kicked things off with a short welcoming address, and then turned the podium over to three entrepreneurs featured in the Emerging Technology Series: Chris Angelo, CEO and co-founder of Glass Dyenamics; Veeral Hardev, vice president of strategy of Ubiquitous Energy; and Aaron Baskerville-Bridges, vice president of operations and co-founder of AeroShield.

Angelo and Glass Dyenamics are developing glass with dynamic tints, which can be adapted to current weather conditions to optimize a home’s energy efficiency. The glass can be darkened slightly in summer to keep heat out, or become clear in winter to allow heat in. The windows can be controlled through a mobile app or a dimmer switch.

As of 2022, several companies provide this kind of glass for commercial buildings; Glass Dyenamics hopes to be the first to scale up this technology for homes. The company is starting to take orders for its first products, which are focused on glass in doors as well as entryways and transoms but anticipates widening to more types of residential windows.

Veeral Hardev took the podium next to talk about Ubiquitous Energy’s transparent solar panels. It’s not the only company working on merging solar panels and windows into one product, but one big challenge to adoption is applying solar cells to glass without also adding color to the glass. Ubiquitous Energy’s product is transparent, however, and works using the principle of selective absorption – the energy harvested to generate electricity comes from solar rays that human eyes cannot see, and therefore consumers are expected to find them less intrusive. The company is partnering with Anderson Corp. to develop its first residential products and expects them to have a U-factor at 0.25 or below and a solar heat gain coefficient between 0.2 and 0.4.

AeroShield’s technology is focused on giving current double-glazed windows more insulating power. It does so by converting transparent silica aerogels into an invisible coating that can be applied to the inside surface of the inner pane of a double-glazed window, Baskerville-Bridges told the audience. It can be applied at different thicknesses. According to AeroShield data, a window with a u-factor of about .23 and argon gas fill would see the figure drop to about 0.16 with a three-millimeter aerogel coating applied to it. That would fall to about 0.14 with a coating of 5mm of aerogel, and 0.13 if the thickness were increased to 0.8mm. The company is currently making about 1,000 square feet of the material annually and remains focused on testing its capacity before developing products to sell.

The entrepreneurs were followed by Katie Cort, a senior economist and project manager of Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, whose presentation focused on the insulating impact of thin triples – three-pane windows with the middle pane at 1/32nd of an inch thick instead of the standard 1/8th, which makes the product lighter and easier to install. Thin triples represent 11% of windows rated by NFRC, but just 3% of market share. Current research suggests that boosting the overall insulating power of a building envelope will require thin triples, as increasing insulation, even tenfold, won’t make a bigger impact.

Mike Thoman, NFRC’s Director, Code Development, Technology, and Innovation, addressed the issue of how new technologies impact getting an NFRC rating for a window, and the benefits of working with the Department of Energy’s national laboratories, such as the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Ca., to prepare developing technologies for the market and get an NFRC rating.

Thoman returned to the podium on the second day of the meeting to update the audience on the Efficient Windows Collaborative, and its Window Selection Tool. The former is NFRC’s consumer-outreach arm, and the latter is its feature offering: a customizable database that homeowners can search to find efficient windows with the right ratings and attributes for their home and climate. Both can be found at the newly renovated web site, www.efficientwindows.org. Window manufacturers in NFRC’s FenStar program that meet ENERGY STAR® requirements will have their products in the Window Selection Tool and can manage their own information as well as upload graphics and pictures of their products.

On the third day, Doug Anderson from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency updated the audience on the latest requirements for a window to qualify for ENERGY STAR 7.0. U-factors were lowered across the board to improve insulating power, with the biggest change being a 0.22 threshold for the northern zone, down from 0.27 previously.

All presentations from the Fall 2022 Membership Meeting can be found HERE: https://nfrccommunity.org/page/MeetingArchive.