He credits his parents and grandparents for his strong work ethic. His father, George, was a manager for a lighting-fixture company. To make extra money, his stay-at-home mother, Ruth, could be found typing away late at night, transcribing dictation from tapes.

Baker learned to cook and clean at age six, after his mother hurt her back while pregnant with his sister. “It taught me to be self-sufficient,” he says.

He graduated from Augustana College, in Rock Island, Ill., in 1978, with a degree in biology and a concentration in environmental science. He earned a master’s in environmental engineering from the University of Iowa in 1985 and a master’s in business administration from the University of Colorado in 2002, while working full time and raising a family.

Baker had married a college-era friend, Kathe Bjork, a veterinarian with the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture. Between the two of them, they have eight college degrees, two jobs and three sons: Evan, 17; Christopher, 15; and Michael, 12. “We’re pretty tired,” says Baker.

An athlete who ran cross-country races barefoot during high school, Baker loves to build things and read. Books helped him discover his real-world heroes, among them Benjamin Franklin, George H.W. Bush and Hillary Clinton. Franklin inspires Baker for his patriotism, Bush for compassion and Clinton for her ability to hit rock bottom and recover with grace.

For the RSF, Baker initially wanted to save DOE about $5 million in annual rent. He also wanted the lab staff out of leased buildings that use 90,000 Btu per sq ft per year of energy.

A career public servant, Baker considers it his patriotic duty to halt energy gluttony. “Nineteen percent of the nation’s energy is consumed in commercial buildings,” he says. “We can’t ignore energy efficiency any more. There is simply no economic, aesthetic or engineering excuse to do so.”

He offers his pet project, delivered furnished for $64 million, as proof. The $259-per-sq-ft price is under the average $335-per-sq-ft cost of 31 LEED buildings that were recently studied.

Baker may identify with Capt. Kirk, but during his 12 years seeking funding for the facility, he more closely resembled Don Quixote tilting at windmills. “Year after year, Jeff kept pounding on the idea, jumping over obstacles,” says John Sullivan, a 2001-2005 deputy assistant energy secretary who is an energy consultant with Decker, Garman & Sullivan LLC, Alexandria, Va.

Baker’s mottos hint at his drive and tenacity: Do the right thing. Don’t let the perfect get in the way of the good. Never let them see you sweat. Always protect your people. Other Baker ingredients for success: Sometimes it’s better to ask forgiveness than permission. Never take no for an answer. Always keep your powder dry. Keep a sense of humor. It’s all good (even when it’s bad).

His doggedness may stem from his biggest regret. As a teen, Baker missed becoming an Eagle Scout by two merit badges. “I got into high school and discovered girls—it was pretty much the end of scouting,” he says. “It taught me the hard way not to give up.”

Baker started working for DOE in Chicago in 1986, and a year later moved to Colorado to join six others at DOE’s Solar Energy Research Institute area office as its staff engineer. In 1991, SERI became NREL and the SERI area office became EERE’s Golden Field Office. NREL currently has a staff of 2,500 and the Golden Field Office has a staff of 450. Much of the growth has to do with funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.

In the lab’s first three decades, DOE invested $200 million. In the last three years, DOE invested $400 million. Baker, who also oversees the lab’s management and operating contract, has been responsible for 13 lab buildings. His duties include project definition, budget preparation and defense, and project execution.

During his tenure, he has been tapped for several assignments at DOE headquarters in Washington, D.C. During one, he created a project management discipline throughout EERE’s six field offices.

“From early on, it was very clear that Jeff was one of the stars of the organization,” says Sullivan. “He quickly became my go-to guy on field management.”

Some years later in Golden, Baker rewrote the lab’s statement of work to allow linkages between the lab’s technologies, government policy and the marketplace. “The new facility is an example of a project developed under those linkages, which weren’t prohibited but also weren’t expressly allowed,” says Baker.

The biggest challenge for Baker during the long push for his pet project, which was outside his regular duties, was finding funding. After failing to get a Congressional appropriation, Baker and John Herrick, then chief counsel in the Golden Field Office, tried third-party financing. DOE was against the idea. But Baker knew the Defense Dept. was using the mechanism. Baker and Herrick soon found proof that third-party financing was not against the rules, as DOE had said, and established it as a legitimate funding mechanism.

“Jeff was tenacious, aggressive and audacious...in keeping to his principles to see his idea to fruition,” says Herrick.

The two crusaders then put together a deal. But it collapsed in 1999 when the economy soured. That was the first devastating defeat. “We had slain all the dragons and then the rug got pulled out from under us,” says Baker. “It was my darkest hour.”

Undaunted, Baker and Herrick tried a slightly different third-party approach. But defeat came a second time in 2004, again because of a weak economy. Baker pulled back and regrouped to strengthen his case. He began to emphasize the building’s sustainability showcase aspect rather than the money-saving aspect.

In the interim, the green movement gained momentum. When the Democrats took over the House of Representatives in 2007, Congress made good on its campaign pledge to fund renewable energy and energy-efficient projects. “Congressman Ed Perlmutter (D.-Colo.) was a part of this process,” says Baker. “He helped shape that bill in the House.”

Victory arrived late one Friday afternoon that March. DOE’s then Assistant Secretary Andy Karsner had invited Baker to “sit in” on a call with the Office of Management and Budget in Washington, D.C. The subject: how to distribute a $300-million EERE appropriation. The official said, in passing, that “he thought the request for funds for the RSF was ‘a good idea,’” says Herrick, also present. “Jeff and I high-fived. There was a cocktail later that night.”

That was the end of one saga and the beginning of another. Entrusted with a total of $80 million, Baker had to figure out how to deliver the goods.

The lab soon introduced the radical idea of design-build delivery. “Jeff was pretty skittish about it; we all were,” says William Glover, the lab’s deputy director.

To get up to speed, the team took a course from the Design Build Institute of America. Soon, the lab, which was contracting the job under Baker’s oversight, issued a request for proposals. But it wasn’t for a standard contract. The RFP detailed a performance-based approach, with intense owner-builder collaboration.

Performance design, unlike prescriptive design, “allows the design-build team to come up with more creative solutions,” says Drew Detamore, director of the lab’s office of infrastructure and campus development. Under a performance approach, “we tell the design-build team what we want the building to do, not what we want it to be or look like,” says Detamore.

The team makes decisions about architecture and materials to meet strict performance criteria. For example, instead of a prescriptive requirement for two, 60-W light bulbs, there might be a performance requirement for 25 foot candles of lighting intensity three ft above the floor in the middle of the room.

“Our performance-based strategy not only challenged conventional wisdom in our corporate oversight offices, such as project management and procurement, it challenged us as well,” says Baker.

The team tried to keep the performance approach below the radar at DOE. “This is one of those times you don’t ask permission beforehand,” says Baker.

The RSF experience made its mark on the members of the Haselden-RNL team. At first, it looked more like it would be a scar. As presented during the design-build competition, the draft RFP contained provisions so onerous that two of the three proposers, including Haselden, walked out. “Suddenly, we did not have a competition,” says Glover.

To save the day, NREL got input from the proposers and issued a final RFP that reduced risk a bit and increased incentives. Haselden won the contract, having offered to deliver all 26 items on the lab’s wish list, including net-zero-energy use. The RSF opened on budget and a day early. And it is performing well.

Though a bit more relaxed of late, Baker still wants to take the nation where it has not gone before. He is bent on disseminating the news of the model, so it can be adapted elsewhere. In 20 years, he says, “I’ve got to believe we’re going to see a completely different sustainability landscape.”