A Look Inside ETEC as Faculty, Staff Move into New Offices

ALBANY, N.Y. (Aug. 19, 2021) – After eight years of planning and three years of construction, UAlbany’s $180 million, 245,000 square-foot ETEC complex is welcoming its first tenants.

With the first phase of construction nearly complete, faculty and staff have started moving into their new office spaces this month and will continue to do so through the start of the Fall 2021 semester.

ETEC is now the largest instructional building on the Uptown Campus. It has the capacity to house more than 200 full-time faculty and researchers and 100 research and industry partners. As many as 800 students will work in its 20 classrooms, teaching labs and other innovative spaces including: a decision theater to replicate emergency operations scenarios, a campus makerspace, a visualization development center, science-on-a-sphere room, weather research map rooms and a glass-enclosed weather observation room. 

Inside the building is the University’s first-in-the-nation College of Emergency Preparedness, Homeland Security and Cybersecurity, along with the Weather-Climate Enterprise – the Department of Atmospheric and Environmental Sciences at the College of Arts and Sciences, Atmospheric Sciences Research Center, New York State Mesonet and Center of Excellence in Weather & Climate Analytics. 

The Department of Environmental and Sustainable Engineering and Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (temporarily) at the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences, chemistry labs, various business development and technology transfer offices, private business partners, and the National Weather Service’s Albany forecast office will be there as well.

Underneath the parking lot is a field of 190 geothermal wells that will provide heating and cooling through heat pumps. Working in combination with nearby solar panels on the Uptown Campus, these measures are expected to offset energy costs by about 70 percent.

It was announced in 2016 that UAlbany would develop 12 neighboring acres on the Harriman Campus to build the ETEC complex. The University broke ground on the site in 2018. Consigli Construction NY, LLC is the general contractor on the project.

An official ribbon-cutting ceremony is being planned for later this fall.

Photos: Brian Busher, Patrick Dodson