News

The Demand Response Research Center has a new website.The Demand Response Research Center plans and conducts multi-disciplinary research to advance demand response within Smart Grid infrastructures in California, the nation, and abroad.Find out more about what they do at the link below.... Read more

Published by Sys-Con Media.IPKeys announced today the successful conclusion of multi-phase pilots at PJM Interconnection for Ancillary Services (Synchronous Reserve and Regulation) utilizing IPKeys’ OpenADR 2.0b certified Energy Interop Server & System (EISS™). The pilot participants - Walmart, PJM, Lawrence Berkley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and Schneider Electric – succeeded in... Read more

BERKELEY — Every year, thousands of students come to Berkeley with vague ambitions to change the world. The annual Big Ideas@Berkeley competition is inspiring some of them to do just that — by launching globally life-changing innovations even before they graduate. Last week, the program honored this year's winning projects with an awards celebration at the Blum Center for Developing... Read more

From a discussion about resources to fund a village solar microgrid in India, to a conversation about the environmental impact of solar portable lamps, to a heated exchange about a claim made by a member in a recent article, what's happening inside LuminaNET this week—a social network for the global off-grid lighting community—looks a lot like what happens in any other robust community of like... Read more

Published by SmartGridNews.com. A few years back, many utilities feared the onset of electric vehicles (EVs). They were concerned about peak load impacts. And about damage to overloaded transformers from nighttime charging. Today, many utilities are eagerly awaiting EV charging, especially those that have a high percentage of intermittent renewables. They want use EV charging to buffer those... Read more

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) has added significant new features and updates to EnergyIQ, its free, web-based, action-oriented benchmarking tool for non-residential buildings. These improvements help new and current users speed and simplify energy benchmarking against a growing database of buildings.To help existing users of the ENERGY STAR Portfolio Manager easily take... Read more

At the second annual BERC Cleanweb Hackathon, a Berkeley Lab Environmental Energy Technologies Division team consisting of Anna Liao, Daniel Olsen, and Andrew Weber, along with Robert Sadler from InTech Energy, took the top prize for best app by developing an intelligent residential irrigation system based on open source hardware. The app processes weekly weather, drought, and sunrise time data to... Read more

A multi-billion dollar market exists for reducing the energy use of existing buildings, if scientists can only figure out a way to substantially reduce the cost and time required to assess building energy performance, recommend energy performance measures, and identify problems in building operations. This is the goal of RAPMOD, the Rapid Building Energy Modeler, a collaborative project involving... Read more

The following press release is from CalCharge, a battery and electrochemical energy storage consortium. Lawrence berkeley National Laboratory is a founding member of CalCharge, with CalCEF (the California Clean Energy Fund). CalCharge announces first corporate members, including Duracell, Volkswagen, Eaton, LG, and Hitachi U.S. Dept of Energy hails new California energy storage consortium as a... Read more

FLEXLAB®, the Facility for Low Energy eXperiments in Buildings, run by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's Environmental Energy Technologies Division (EETD), has partnered with construction firm Webcor to test building energy performance. The testing will allow Webcor's engineers to predict and improve the energy performance for a new building constructed for biotech company, Genentech, a... Read more

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Working Group III, addressing the mitigation of climate change, has issued an executive summary of its Fifth Assessment report. The report updates policymakers on the technical and socio-economic aspects of climate change, including technologies and policies that can reduce impacts.According to its website, "The IPCC Working Group III assesses all... Read more

At the invitation of a Chinese government think-tank to provide scientific guidance to address China's energy and environmental concerns, the China Energy Group (CEG) of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory gave its first training on its energy and emissions modeling tool in China between March 5 and 28, 2014. The 10-day training in Jinan City on the use of the Green Resources and Energy... Read more

Plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs) are here, and more are coming. By 2013, 100,000 PEVs were sold in the United States, and the number is growing. One study forecasts that more than a million plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) will be sold in California, New York, Washington, and Florida alone between 2013 and 2022. Electric vehicles (EVs) are also growing in range and sales. As the cost of... Read more

The Roof Coatings Manufacturers Association (RCMA) has opened early bird registration for the International Roof Coatings Conference (IRCC). The IRCC will take place at the Royal Sonesta Harbor Court Hotel in Baltimore, Maryland on July 14-17, 2014. This conference will highlight the latest technological advancements and emerging issues of relevance to the roof coating, building envelope, green... Read more

From PPG Industries' press release: PPG Industries' industrial coatings business has received a $224,000 award from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to help develop dark-colored pigments for cool metal roof and façade coatings that incorporate near-infrared (NIR) fluorescence and reflectance to improve energy performance. The award is part of a $530,000 project that includes a $250,000 award... Read more

In light of recent criticism of a study authored by several Heat Island Group researchers by the EPDM Roofing Association, the Heat Island Group's Benjamin Mandel (a coauthor of the study) has submitted a response to Today's Facility Manager. See below for a link to the TFM column and for other relevant articles.... Read more

From University of California Berkeley, International House: International House at UC Berkeley—one of the largest multi-national residential and programming cultural centers in the world—will honor philanthropist Wendy Schmidt and inventor Dr. Ashok Gadgil as Alumni of the Year 2014 at a gala celebration Thursday, April 10th, in its historic east bay facility...Dr. Ashok Gadgil lived at... Read more

The editors of Engineering News-Record magazine have given Stephen Selkowitz is the 2014 Award of Excellence "for relentlessly working to reduce the carbon footprint of buildings and for moving the nation toward better building performance, as well as for being the master of commercializing energy-efficient building technologies and the mastermind of FLEXLAB®," the Facility for Low-Energy... Read more

On Berkeley Lab's newscenter.lbl.gov website:What makes cities in India and China so frustrating to drive in—heavy traffic, aggressive driving style, few freeways—makes them ideal for saving fuel with hybrid vehicles, according to new research by scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab). In a pair of studies using real-world driving... Read more

Plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs) are here, and more are coming. By 2013, 100,000 PEVs were sold in the United States, and the number is growing. One study forecasts that more than a million plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) will be sold in California, New York, Washington, and Florida alone between 2013 and 2022. Electric vehicles (EVs) are also growing in range and sales. As the cost of... Read more

EETD's Electricity Markets and Policy Group announces a new joint Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and National Renewable Energy Laboratory report, "Comparing Photovoltaic (PV) Costs and Deployment Drivers in the Japanese and U.S. Residential and Commercial Markets." This work investigates the rapidly changing and expanding Japanese PV market, offering primary research on the similarities and... Read more

As more states and utilities increasingly turn to energy efficiency programs to manage demand for electricity and natural gas, it is important to understand how much saving energy costs. By examining regulatory reports on efficiency programs in 31 states, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) researchers have determined the cost of saving energy through efficiency programs funded by... Read more

In February, Open Automated Demand Response (OpenADR) achieved another milestone toward becoming an international standard when the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC), a renowned standards development organization, released a profile of OpenADR 2.0 as a Publicly Available Specification (PAS). This action recognizes OpenADR as a standard that will enable our electricity systems to be... Read more

In its latest effort to support Chinese cities in reducing carbon emissions, researchers from the China Energy Group of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory trained 20 Chinese researchers of China’s Shandong Academy of Science in Jinan city on March 6-7 in the use of four low carbon software tools. The trainees expressed great interest in the tools. Future training and tool dissemination... Read more

The California Energy Commission has funded a Northern California Alternative Transportation Fuel and Advanced Vehicle Technology Center (North CAT) to be based at the University of California, Berkeley. The Environmental Energy Technologies Division of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory is a partner, as is CalCharge, the public-private partnership between Berkeley Lab and the California... Read more