News

Quantifying the Economic Implications of Indoor Air on Energy Efficiency, Performance, and HealthWilliam Fisk is a senior scientist, mechanical engineer, and leader of the Indoor Environment Group at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL). During his 33 years at the lab, he has researched the interrelated issues of building energy performance, ventilation, indoor environmental quality (IEQ),... Read more

The White House has announced that Adam Weber has won a Presidential Early Career Award. Weber is a staff scientist at the Environmental Energy Technologies Division of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab). His current research involves understanding and optimizing fuel-cell performance and lifetime; understanding flow batteries for grid-scale energy storage; and analysis of... Read more

What's the coolest place in Los Angeles? It may be right over your head. Starting in 2014, thanks to an update of the Municipal Building Code, all new or refurbished buildings will be equipped with "cool roofs." A cool roof is built of reflective rather than absorptive material. Compared to traditional roofs, cool roofs can be as much as 50 degrees cooler on the roof surface, and can lower... Read more

A proposal to build a Home Energy Score API (Application Program Interface) has won the first prize in the Department of Energy’s first Energy Data Challenge. The proposal’s goal is to integrate Home Energy Scores, developed by researchers in Berkeley Lab’s Environmental Energy Technologies Division, into home sales and rental listings. This could make it easier for families to factor energy... Read more

Researchers in the Environmental Energy Technologies Division of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have released a new report titled “Exploring California PV Home Premiums.”Although photovoltaic (PV) penetration in the United States is increasing rapidly, properly valuing homes with PV systems remains a barrier to PV deployment. Previous studies show that PV homes command sales price... Read more

OverviewThe building envelope – also known as the building shell, fabric or enclosure – is the boundary between the conditioned interior of a building and the outdoors. The energy performance of building envelope components, including external walls, floors, roofs, ceilings, windows and doors, is critical in determining how much energy is required for heating and cooling. The building... Read more

See below for a link to "Cool Roofs Rising" from Ensia, an online magazine from the Institute on the Environment at the University of Minnesota.... Read more

Researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and their colleagues studied the chemical mechanisms that allow photocatalysis to remove pollution from indoor air and urban atmospheres, as well as allow self-cleaning surfaces to work. The basis of the process is a catalyst such as titanium dioxide (TiO2) energized by light. Building materials and coatings with nano-sized... Read more

The Sustainable Federal Operations Group (SFOG) brings together expertise in technology, development, and deployment to support the public sector in achieving energy, environmental, and sustainability goals. Learn more about what they do by visiting their new website at the address below.... Read more

The Army, on Friday November 29, announced a notice of intent to award a contract to build an 18.6-megawatt solar photovoltaic (PV) facility at Fort Detrick, in Frederick, Maryland. This action will help the service meet its goal of deploying one gigawatt of renewable energy by 2025. The selected contractor is Framingham, Mass.-based Ameresco.Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab),... Read more

In October 2014, the Heat Island Group will be hosting the 3rd International Conference on Countermeasures to Urban Heat Islands (IC2UHI). The conference will be held in Venice, Italy from October 13-15, 2014 with the support of our colleagues at Università degli studi di Modena e Reggio Emilia. We would like to invite you to contribute and participate! The Conference will be devoted to the... Read more

Standardizing Grid Signals for integrated demand side managementSila Kiliccote is Acting Leader of the Grid Integration Group at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab). She has been a part of the automated demand response team developing an automated communication infrastructure, integrating it with building control systems and working with stakeholders to standardize the information... Read more

A number of scientists from the Environmental Energy Technologies Division are presenting papers and posters at the American Geophysical Union Meeting next week in San Francisco. Here are brief descriptions of one talk and two posters by EETD scientists and their colleagues. For more information, go to the AGU meeting site at the link below, where you can look up presentations by scientists from... Read more

Four members of the China Energy Group and two visitors from China's Energy Research Institute spent two days working together on their joint Reinventing Fire: China project with Rocky Mountain Institute staff members on December 4 and 5, 2013. The project, which builds on the analysis in RMI's Reinventing Fire project for the U.S., aims to combine the research skills of the U.S. and Chinese team... Read more

From the University of California Berkeley: UC Berkeley graduate students committed to advancing sustainability are eligible for the Art Rosenfeld Award for Energy Efficiency, recognizing the Berkeley professor who is a global champion of energy conservation and technologies to support it. Annual Rosenfeld Awards of initially $3,000 will be given to promote research and scholarly pursuit in... Read more

Assessing Probability and Uncertainty for Smarter Decisions and PoliciesIn this first of a series of Q&As with researchers in the Environmental Energy Technologies Division, Michael Sohn talks about probability and uncertainty in modeling.Michael Sohn is an environmental engineer working to understand how chemicals and energy are used in the world at various scales—global, state, and... Read more

The 40th anniversary of the founding of the Environmental Energy Technologies Division at Berkeley Lab was November 1, 2013.Thursdays in November, we’ll look back at a significant energy-efficient technology developed by EETD and its research partners.This WeekIn the late 1970s, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) led the effort to develop DOE-2, the computer program that has... Read more

In Scientific American magazine’s December 2013 issue, “World-changing ideas,” the cover story, “How supercomputers will yield a golden age of materials science,” sets the scene for the issue’s focus on practical innovations emerging from the laboratory.In the article, MIT’s Gerbrand Ceder and Environmental Energy Technologies Division scientist Kristin Persson describe the Materials... Read more

Battery could find use in mobile applications, and eventually, electric vehicles with 300-mile rangeResearchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have demonstrated in the laboratory a lithium-sulfur (Li/S) battery that has more than twice the specific energy of lithium-ion batteries, and that lasts for more than 1,500 cycles of charge-discharge... Read more

The China Energy Group's Lynn Price, Nan Zhou, and Lixuan Hong participated in the Energy Foundation China's 16th Senior Policy Advisory Council Meeting on November 15 which featured the Group's collaborative project with the Energy Foundation China, Rocky Mountain Institute, and China's Energy Research Institute. The theme of this year's meeting was "Reinventing Fire: Contributing to China's... Read more

The Darfur Stoves Project, now managed by the non-profit organization Potential Energy, originated as an effort at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to develop fuel-efficient stoves. These stoves reduced the need for women in the Darfur camps to forage for wood, where they were exposed to violence. Learn more at the link below. The project’s efforts are now expanding to other regions. The... Read more

The 40th anniversary of the founding of the Environmental Energy Technologies Division at Berkeley Lab was November 1, 2013.Thursdays in November, we’ll look back at a significant energy-efficient technology developed by EETD and its research partners.This WeekBerkeley Lab researchers designed and maintain the Home Energy Saver (HES) to help consumers identify the best ways to save energy and... Read more

November Special Focus: Energy Efficiency, Buildings and the Electric GridDistributed Energy Resources Expected to Grow Rapidly as Cost of Renewable Power and Natural Gas DeclinesScientists in the Environmental Energy Technologies Division of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory are working with the University of New Mexico to ease the way for the seamless integration of self-generated... Read more

November Special Focus: Energy Efficiency, Buildings and the Electric Grid Most buildings in the U.S. don't perform as energy-efficiently as they could simply because energy-using equipment in the building have never been set up to maximize energy performance. Thermostat setpoints are too low or too high, so rooftop units (RTUs) cool buildings down below recommended temperatures, or keep them too... Read more

Lynn Price, the Leader of the China Energy Group, was named a Guest Professor at the University of Science and Technology Beijing by University President Zhang Xinxin. The guest professorship is a key component of a multi-year program of China’s Ministry of Education called the Program for Introducing Expertise to Universities. The specific focus of the program is on industrial energy... Read more