News

The National Science Foundation has announced that it is funding the Building Efficiency for a Sustainable Tomorrow at Laney College, Oakland California, with a four-year four million dollar grant. The BEST Center will develop curricula for two-year colleges throughout the U.S. to educate building control technicians, incorporating energy-efficient technologies and practices. Scientists at... Read more

As clouds pass in front of the sun, incoming daylight is reduced in the interior of a section of the fourth floor of an office building at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab). In this new lighting and plug load testbed, light sensors read the change in light levels, and energy-efficient ceiling fixtures gradually increase their light output to compensate.Sensors on every light... Read more

On those sweltering summer days—when it's too hot to play at the playground, when it seems like you could fry an egg on the pavement, when your car feels like an oven after a couple hours parked at the mall—it's not just the beating sun that's driving up the temperature. It's our very urban environment, in which most of our paved surfaces are dark, absorbing almost all of the sunlight that... Read more

The Environmental Energy Technologies Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory invites applications for the inaugural year of a postdoctoral fellowship opportunity. The fellowship will allow an outstanding recent or upcoming Ph.D. recipient to engage in innovative research leading to new energy efficiency technologies or policies and reduction of adverse energy-related environmental... Read more

Open SMART Energy Gateway (OpenSEG) (formerly Residential Energy Display Survey (REDS) Pilot) Security concerns have hindered the widespread development of Home Area Networks (HAN) that can allow users to monitor their energy consumption and respond in near real time to changing prices for energy. Recognizing the need for an architecture that would allow direct display of near real time energy... Read more

The following release was posted to the University of California Berkeley's news site today. EETD's Thomas McKone is a co-principal investigator of this grant. McKone is Deputy for Research Programs in the Energy Analysis and Impact Assessments Department.The Berkeley Center for Green Chemistry (BCGC) has been awarded a $3.4 million training grant by the National Science Foundation. The grant will... Read more

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies offer an opportunity to mitigate carbon emissions from coal power plants, which continue to supply more of the world's electricity than any other single source. However, the most effective deployment strategies and the cost of the technology's application are still uncertain.Berkeley Lab's Environmental Energy Technologies Division (EETD) researchers... Read more

The Department of Energy has released the winning student team from the Max Tech Appliance Design Contest. The Max Tech competition, held in May of this year, was coordinated by a team in the Environmental Energy Technologies Division of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab). Here is DOE's announcement:As part of the Obama Administration's commitment to supporting the next... Read more

EETD's Mary Ann Piette, Head of the Building Technologies and Urban Systems Department, is quoted on how demand response can help modernize the electric grid and save energy in "10 Fixes for the New Energy Crisis" in Popular Mechanics.... Read more

Within an electric grid, timing is everything. "It's not how much power you use, it's when you use it," says Mary Ann Piette, who directs the Demand Response Research Center at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The biggest benefits of adjusting demand come with automation. Piette and her colleagues have spent nine years developing standards for how utilities communicate with buildings'... Read more

In 2020, if all goes according to plan, the state of California will get 33 percent of its electricity from renewable power, including solar and wind, as required by the state's Renewable Portfolio Standard. But wind doesn't blow all the time, and the sun doesn't provide as much power on cloudy days—renewable power is intermittent. This poses a problem for the electric grid's operators, who need... Read more

Once the domain of guesswork and intuition, the field of developing new materials for advanced batteries and other applications is taking a turn towards a more systematic and predictive approach. Predicting the properties of new materials from "first principles" has become a scientific reality, thanks to the growth in computing power, a deeper understanding of how materials work, and databases of... Read more

The expiration of key federal incentives could bring that wave crashing down in 2013, despite a significant decline in the cost of wind energyFacing looming policy uncertainty beyond 2012, the U.S. remained one of the fastest-growing wind power markets in the world in 2011—second only to China—according to a new report released by the U.S. Department of Energy and prepared by Lawrence Berkeley... Read more

The White House Blog showcases a post by David Danielson highlighting the just-released Berkeley Lab report, 2011 Wind Technologies Market Report. Danielson is Assistant Secretary for Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy at the U.S. Department of Energy. The post, “A Banner Year for the U.S. Wind Industry,” summarizes some of the report’s findings, such as the growth in wind power capacity... Read more

The development team for EETD’s energy self-audit websites, Home Energy Saver and Home Energy Scoring Tool, has made four new papers available:An in-depth assessment of Home Energy Saver calculation accuracy, along with a broader discussion of the issues and challenges in validating residential energy analysis tools. The bottom line is that—given high-quality inputs on both the physical... Read more

Morgan Hill, CA, Aug. 8, 2012: The OpenADR Alliance today announced the release of the OpenADR 2.0a Profile Specification, the only existing open data model to exchange messages for Demand Response (DR) events between a service provider, aggregator and end-user in commercial, industrial and residential markets. OpenADR 2.0a is one of a suite of Smart Grid communication profiles that provides... Read more

"Cool Your School" is a series of 6th-grade, classroom-based, science activities rooted in Berkeley Lab's cool surface and cool materials research and aligned with California content standards for science education. The activities are designed to build knowledge, stimulate curiosity, and carry the conversation about human-induced climate change, and what can be done about it, into the... Read more

A new software tool from scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) will help architects, engineers, and urban planners better assess and manage the environmental impacts of structural materials in commercial buildings.The software tool, called the B-PATH model (Berkeley Lab Building Materials Pathways), allows designers and builders to estimate the energy, resources,... Read more

We are pleased to offer three new QECB Clean Energy Financing Policy Briefs — the latest in a series highlighting innovative approaches to financing clean energy projects:Qualified Energy Conservation Bond (QECB) Update: New Guidance from the U.S. Department of Treasury and Internal Revenue Services In June 2012, the U.S. Department of the Treasury (Treasury) and the Internal Revenue Service... Read more

Help the Residential Building Systems Group of the Environmental Energy Technologies Division to model exposures to air pollutants in homes! Please take a few minutes and fill out our cooking survey.The survey asks questions about what and how you have cooked in past 24 hours in your home. The survey does not ask for any private information and should only take 10 minutes of your time. Previous... Read more

The Batteries for Advanced Transportation Technologies (BATT) program has issued its second quarterly report of research highlights for Fiscal Year 2012. You can download it from the BATT web site.The BATT Program is supported by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Vehicle Technologies (OVT) to help develop high-performance rechargeable batteries for use in electric vehicles (EVs) and... Read more

From Symmetry Magazine, a publication of Fermilab and SLAC: Brian Gerke follows the second law of thermodynamics: He likes to spread his energy in different directions. An English major who also studied physics—not physics for poets, but a rigorous second major in physics—Gerke has always prized a full, diverse life. So even though it wasn't an easy decision after 10 years in cosmology... Read more

The Energy Service Company (ESCO) industry is analyzed in a new report from the Environmental Energy Technologies Division of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab).The authors of the study conceived it as a snapshot of the ESCO industry prior to the economic slowdown and the introduction of federal stimulus funding mandated by enactment of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act... Read more

Alan Meier, a scientist in EETD and at the University of California, Davis, as well as Executive Editor of Home Energy magazine, has published an article there titled "Why Japan's ELectricity Crisis Matter." Here's an excerpt and a link to the full piece:You may not read about it on the front page of the newspapers, but Japan is undergoing a second electricity crisis. The first took place last... Read more

As high-performance supercomputer performance begins to approach the Exascale range, the accompanying increases in electricity required to power these computers is motivating developers to produce components that provide higher flops (floating-point operations per second) per watt. It is well agreed that improved performance will save both time and computing costs, but how is performance best... Read more