News

For years, industrial facilities have saved energy by investing in more-efficient equipment or operational methods as old equipment ages and new strategies emerge. However, studies show that to achieve deep, persistent energy savings, companies must implement a facility-wide process that continuously monitors those changes and allows for improvements that ensure optimal performance.With that in... Read more

EETD's Hanna Breunig has been named one of 16 Schmidt-MacArthur Fellows in the program's class of 2014.Breunig is a graduate student researcher in the Sustainable Energy Systems Group's emerging technology analysis group, Environmental Energy Technologies Division, and a PhD candidate in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. She is one of... Read more

When Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) scientist Ashok Gadgil set out to solve an insidious public health problem afflicting South Asia, arsenic contamination of groundwater, he knew the hard part would not just be inventing the technology but also ensuring a way to sustain its long-term use on a large scale."A lot of technologies to remove arsenic on the community- and... Read more

The Indoor Environment Group has a new website. The Indoor Environment Group carries out research enabling healthy, productive and energy efficient built environments in the context of climate change adaptation. Learn more about what they do at the link below.... Read more

The National Inventors Hall of Fame (NIHF), in partnership with the U.S. Department of Commerce's United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has named EETD Division Director Ashok Gadgil a member of its 2014 Class of Inductees. The NIHF Inductee list includes inventors who have made extraordinary contributions to their respective fields, and in many cases, changed the world forever.Gadgil... Read more

It is well-documented that prodigious amounts of energy and money have been saved by energy-efficient building technologies. California alone has saved billions of dollars, prevented tons of pollutants, and avoided having to build additional power plants thanks to its efficiency efforts. Still, the effectiveness of these technologies is dependent on building occupants not only using them, but... Read more

The Bay Area Council's Economic Institute recently released Ties That Bind, 2014 Edition: The San Francisco Bay Area's Economic Links to Greater China, which includes a detailed summary of LBNL's China Energy Group. The report traces the efforts of the group’s founder, Dr. Mark D. Levine, back to 1987 when he highlighted the need for comprehensive energy consumption data collection in Chinese... Read more

The ARPA-E Energy Innovation Summit opens today in Washington D.C., bringing together researchers from academia, business, and government to advance energy technology innovation. The Technology Showcase at the Summit presents America's next generation of transformational energy technologies.The Environmental Energy Technologies DIvision of Lawerence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and... Read more

A building owner changes the building's thermostat setting, allowing the indoor temperature to increase a couple of degrees for an entire afternoon. But how much energy was actually saved? To know the answer for sure, the energy actually used must be compared to the energy that would have been used if they hadn't made the change…but how does the building owner find that out? The answer is... Read more

The U.S.-China Clean Energy Research Center—Building Energy Efficiency Consortium (CERC-BEE) has a new website. Find out more about what they do at the link below.... Read more

The China Energy Group of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has released the MAnufacturing STructure and Energy Research (MASTER) tool. The MASTER tool is designed to help users understand how different factors (production growth of industry subsectors, industry structural change, and energy intensity change of industry subsectors) influence overall industrial energy use trends over time.... Read more

The following press release was published on the University of North Carolina's news website today, and a paper reporting the results has been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. Read the full text at the link below. Nitash Balsara, faculty senior scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at the University... Read more

Smarter power plugs and appliances that can turn electronics on and off according to a homeowner's behavior rather than a fixed schedule. A water heater that delivers water to the different fixtures in the house at temperatures customized for the particular water use. A smarter-than-ever thermostat that knows how to set different temperatures for different rooms in a house. High-pressure water... Read more

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) recently teamed with the Consortium for Energy Efficiency (CEE) to host a workshop on commercial energy management, and tours of Berkeley Lab's new Facility for Low Energy eXperiments in Buildings (FLEXLAB®). Tour attendees learned about how FLEXLAB can test the performance of emerging building technologies. About 40 people attended.The... Read more

While costs for some solar photovoltaics (PV) have dropped sharply over the past few years, the search for PV modules that are both low-cost and highly efficient continues. An important focus of that quest is on developing lower-cost, more-efficient methods of attaining electron-hole separation. Plasmonic energy conversion, which generates "hot" (highly energetic) electrons in plasmonic... Read more

The Microgrids Group at Berkeley Lab studies customer adoption patterns of microgrid technology. A microgrid is a localized grouping of electricity sources and loads that normally operates connected to and synchronous with the traditional centralized grid (macrogrid), but can disconnect and function autonomously as physical and/or economic conditions dictate. Find out more about their research at... Read more

The following story appears on the website of Berkeley Lab's Advanced Light Source. Three of the scientists involved in this research are based in Berkeley Lab's Environmental Energy Technologies Division.Developing high-performance batteries relies on material breakthroughs. During the past few years, various in situ characterization tools have been developed and have become indispensable in... Read more

The Department of Energy-led Center of Expertise demonstrates national leadership in decreasing the energy use of data centers. The Center partners with key influential public and private stakeholders and supplies know-how, tools, best practices, analyses, and the introduction of technologies to assist Federal agencies with implementing policies and developing data center energy efficiency... Read more

Placed thoughtfully and in sufficient number, building occupancy sensors can provide data sufficient to reduce building energy use, and the potential savings are enormous. However, the time and expense involved in installing and maintaining dedicated occupancy sensors can hinder their widespread use. But what if those savings could be achieved more simply and cheaply, without having to install... Read more

From the U.S. Department of Energy:As part of the Energy Department's commitment to helping families across the United States save money by saving energy, the Department announced today its first major software update to the Home Energy Scoring Tool, developed by the Department's Building Technologies Office and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.The Home Energy Score allows homebuyers to... Read more

Looking strictly at the economic costs and benefits of three different roof types—black, white and "green" (or vegetated)—Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) researchers have found in a new study that white roofs are the most cost-effective over a 50-year time span. While the high installation cost of green roofs sets them back in economic terms, their environmental and... Read more

Glossy photos in magazines and on the web tend to portray server rooms as large spaces with gleaming, symmetrical rows of servers on temperature-controlled racks. In reality, however, 57 percent of U.S. servers are housed in small spaces such as server closets and localized data centers, in what are commonly referred to as small server rooms. Such spaces comprise 99.3 percent of all server spaces... Read more

Massachusetts focused-study finds other factors, such as proximity to highways, beaches have price impactLawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) along with University of Connecticut analyzed more than 122,000 home sales near 26 wind facilities (with over 1,500 within a mile of operating turbines) in densely populated Massachusetts, yet was unable to uncover any impacts to nearby home... Read more

Green Light New York and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have partnered to develop a pair of "Living Lab" demonstration projects that will deploy innovative lighting, daylighting and shading systems in working New York City office spaces. The team has secured the participation of two Fortune 100 companies, each of which have committed to using an individual floor of their flagship NYC... Read more

Tools and models to find the best way to save energy and reduce greenhouse gas emissions in cities and industries, to follow the transport of pollutants through the environment, and to calculate the cost of power interruptions are among those available on a new Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) web site.The site brings together models and simulation tools developed by the Energy... Read more