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August Special Focus: the Facility for Low-Energy Xperiments in BuildingsPhoto caption:Workers constructing the Facility for Low-Energy Experiments in Buildings (FLEXLAB®) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have installed the steel foundation for the rotating testbed. When completed, users of the rotating testbed will be able to measure the performance of energy-saving building technologies... Read more

Lighting represents 26 percent of a commercial building’s electric load, which roughly translates to 10 percent of a building’s operating costs. Advanced lighting controls can greatly reduce that load, but so far, U.S. commercial building owners and operators have not reaped those energy savings—only one percent of those buildings use lighting control systems.Given the potential savings, why... Read more

It is now common to hear about record high temperatures across U.S. cities. Cities are especially susceptible to extreme heat owing to a phenomenon known as the "urban heat island effect." As this effect attracts increased attention and research, new ways are emerging to help cool sweltering cities, which will also save energy and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. One way to counteract the urban... Read more

Aimee McKane, deputy group leader at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's Environmental Energy technologies Division, will receive the Finegan Standards Medal of the American National Standards Institute, which honors an individual who has shown extraordinary leadership in the development and application of voluntary standards. McKane was nominated by the U.S. Technical Advisory Group (US... Read more

A feature article from Berkeley Lab's Public Affairs Department about EETD scientists studying indoor air pollution:Scientist Brett Singer is a vegetarian. So why has he been frying up hamburgers? Singer and his team of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) indoor air researchers have found hazardous levels of nitrogen dioxide and carbon monoxide in a surprisingly large portion of... Read more

The Environmental Energy Technologies Division (EETD) of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the Buildings Technology Office of the Department of Energy announce the launch of Simergy, a free graphical user interface (GUI) that enables the whole-building energy modeling engine, EnergyPlus, to be used more easily and effectively. Simergy helps meet the building energy modeling needs of... Read more

The Interntaional Energy Studies Group (IES) of the Environmental Energy Technologies Division has a new website. The International Energy Studies (IES) Group provides innovative scientific analysis that enables countries to consider policies, implement programs, and deploy technologies to meet energy needs efficiently and sustainably. Learn more about their work at the link below.... Read more

The Green Parking Council held a webinar on cool pavements as a sustainability measure for parking lots. The webinar featured a presentation on cool pavements by Heat Island Group researchers Haley Gilbert and Ben Mandel. View the recorded webinar below:For more information on the Green Parking Council, see their website. [Note: In 2016, the Green Parking Council was rebranded and launched as... Read more

Because data centers are responsible for one to two percent of the world's electricity use, they are the target of considerable research into how to reduce their carbon emissions. However, assessing the true carbon intensity of data centers has not been easy. There are numerous metrics in circulation, as well as claims about their energy and carbon emissions performance. Climate policies with... Read more

EETD scientist Michael Tucker is a member of the R&D 100 winning-team that developed the innovative fuel cell technology from Point Source Power described below. Tucker is a scientist in the Energy Storage and Distributed Resources Department's Electrochemistry Technologies Group of the Enironmental Energy Technologies Department.From the Berkeley Lab press release:Point Source Power and... Read more

A team of Berkeley Lab Environmental Energy Technologies Division researchers led by Gao Liu has won a 2013 R&D 100 Award for developing a technology to boost the power storage capacity of lithium-ion batteries. Liu's team included Wanli Yang, Lin-Wang Wang, and Vincent Battaglia and postdoctoral fellows Sang-Jae Park, Mingyan Wu, and Shidi Xun.The new material, for use in rechargeable... Read more

A paper by scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and colleagues examining the net energy of a hydrogen-generating technology, which is still in development in the lab, is one of last week's "Hot Articles" in the refereed journal Energy and Environmental Science. Net energy is the amount of hydrogen produced minus the energy required to manufacture the... Read more

Since 1978, Ed Vine has been at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), focused on evaluating how technologies and behavior are helping us move toward a more energy-efficient future. When he began his work, energy evaluation experts were self-trained and few. Today, the profession is well armed with research and protocols—a much more widespread and professional field—in good part... Read more

The following press release about the Data Science for Social Good Summer Fellowships comes from the Computation Institute, a joint project of the University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory. Berkeley Lab's Environmental Energy Technologies Division is a partner with the Fellowship. EETD's project with the Fellowship focuses on energy-efficient buildings data. For more information,... Read more

Part of California Governor Brown’s Clean Energy Jobs Plan is the goal of increasing combined heat and power (CHP) generation in the state by an additional 6.5 gigawatts (GW) by 2030. In 2009, the California Public Utilities Commission’s Self-Generation Incentive Program (SGIP) database identified only 0.25 GW of small scale CHP. With the financial incentives of the SGIP program expiring in... Read more

With a move toward smarter building ventilation systems that respond to specific inside-air conditions as they arise — resulting in healthier air at a lower cost — comes a need for more precise monitoring of indoor conditions such as temperature, humidity, carbon dioxide levels, and pollutants such as formaldehyde gas. The VOC True Read is a new technology that enables the long-sought accurate... Read more

From a White House news release sent earlier today:"Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory [Berkeley Lab], Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Intermolecular, Inc., are working together to more accurately predict material behavior with software tools made openly available by [Berkeley Lab]. Building on data from existing high-throughput combinatorial experimentation and simulation,... Read more

The Shenzhen Institute of Building Research of Shenzhen, China will collaborate with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) on a variety of research and technology development and demonstration projects under a memorandum of understanding recently signed in Shenzhen by both parties. Lynn Price, leader of the China Energy Group in Berkeley Lab’s Environmental Energy Technologies... Read more

The Department of Energy recently announced new energy efficiency standards for microwave ovens. They will save consumers nearly $3 billion on their energy bills through 2030. Over the next 30 years, the standards will reduce an amount of carbon emissions that is equivalent to taking over 12 million new cars off the road for one year.Researchers at the Energy Efficiency Standards Group in EETD,... Read more

Thomas McKone, Deputy of the Energy Analysis and Environmental Impacts Department in EETD, has been re-appointed by California’s Governor Jerry Brown to the California Scientific Guidance Panel, where he has served since 2007. McKone has been adjunct professor of environmental health sciences at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Public Health since 1996 and has held multiple... Read more

On Friday, June 21, Heat Island Group researchers George Ban-Weiss and Ben Mandel appeared on the Weather Channel to discuss Berkeley Lab's efforts to demonstrate the heat island mitigation and air quality benefits of cool pavements. Related Video: https://www.youtube.com/embed/U-7q55gDxqQ... Read more

The Shenzhen Institute of Building Research of Shenzhen, China will collaborate with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) on a variety of research and technology development and demonstration projects under a memorandum of understanding recently signed in Shenzhen by both parties.Lynn Price, leader of the China Energy Group in Berkeley Lab’s Environmental Energy Technologies... Read more

A new database of building features and energy use data helps building managers, owners, real estate investors, and lenders evaluate the financial results of energy efficiency investment projects and identify high and low-performing buildings. The U.S. Department of Energy’s Buildings Performance Database (BPD) is being developed by a team of researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National... Read more

Berkeley Lab scientists have invented a new material for use in rechargeable batteries that can boost power storage capacity by 30 percent, a dramatic improvement in field marked by little progress for more than a decade. It is called a Conducting Polymer Binder, literally a kind of flexible plastic glue that holds electrode materials together while facilitating the shuttling of electrons and... Read more

The California Air Resources Board released the following press release today. Thomas Kirchstetter, a sceintist in the Environmental Energy Technologies Division participated in this study. California's efforts to clean up diesel engines have helped reduce impact of climate change on state, study finds Clean diesel programs slashed black carbon, a powerful short-term contributor to global warming... Read more