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General registration is now open for the Beyond Lithium Ion V Conference! Click here to register for the conference at the Early Bird rate of $380. The Early Bird deadline is March 31, 2012 so please be sure to register soon. After the Early Bird deadline conference registration will increase to $430. As an essential part of understanding the contribution that materials science will make to... Read more

A new study from scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), published in Nature Climate Change, has quantitatively demonstrated that black carbon—also known as soot, a pollutant emitted from power plants, diesel engines and residential cooking and heating, as well as forest fires—reduces the reflectance of snow and ice, an effect that increases the rate of global... Read more

At some point this year, after NASA's rover Curiosity has landed on Mars, a laser will fire a beam of infrared light at a rock or soil sample. This will "ablate" or vaporize a microgram-sized piece of the target, generating a plume of ionized gas or plasma, which will be analyzed by spectrometers to identify the target's constituent elements. Future Mars rovers, however, will be able to do even... Read more

Solar energy has long captured the hearts and minds of U.S. university students, with the Solar Decathlon biennially celebrating their achievements on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. But what of energy efficiency, the workhorse for cost-effective carbon emission reductions? Can we inspire the nation’s brightest minds to pursue radical efficiency improvements in the appliances and equipment... Read more

Ashok Gadgil, Director of the Environmental Energy Technologies Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, answers some questions about the LBNL Institute for Globally Transformative Technologies.What exactly is LIGTT?The LBNL Institute for Globally Transformative Technologies is a new institute to develop and deploy new technology to fight poverty around the globe using sustainable methods.... Read more

The Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) is establishing the new LBNL Institute for Globally Transformative Technologies (LIGTT) to close the innovation gap for developing countries and create a pipeline of demand-driven technologies in the key areas for international development, including fuel-efficient cook-stoves, safe drinking water and access to... Read more

Widespread adoption of electric vehicles could greatly reduce dependence on finite petroleum resources, reduce CO2 emissions and provide new scenarios for grid operation. Although new electric vehicles with advanced lithium ion batteries are being introduced, further breakthroughs in scalable energy storage, beyond current state-of-the-art lithium ion batteries, are necessary before the full... Read more

One of the quickest, most inexpensive paths to increasing gas mileage and reducing vehicle carbon dioxide emissions is to reduce vehicle weight, rather than investing in new, expensive vehicle technologies. Concerns that reducing vehicle weight will result in increased fatalities from vehicle accidents have hindered past efforts to substantially increase fuel economy standards, but recent research... Read more

Ashok Gadgil, the Director of the Environmental Energy Technologies Division of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), has won the Lifetime Achievement award of the Zayed Future Energy Prize. The award was announced in Abu Dhabi at the Zayed award ceremony today.The $3.5 million Zayed Future Energy Prize, managed by Masdar in Abu Dhabi, recognizes and rewards innovation,... Read more

Developed by Berkeley Lab Scientists to Help Building Managers Get Started Using These Systems to Increase Building Energy EfficiencyThe Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and U.S. Department of Energy have released The Energy Information Handbook: Applications for Energy-Efficient Buildings Operations. This free book guides commercial building owners and operators who have no experience with... Read more

The Global Cool Cities Alliance (GCCA) has launched a Cool Roofs and Pavements Toolkit to help cities, regions, organizations, and building owners develop and deploy successful cool surface initiatives. The Toolkit is an on-line resource that GCCA will build up over time with targeted tools for a range of audiences. It is being launched with the publication of a primer and implementation guide,... Read more

Call it the bright side of globalization: progressive solutions midwifed by transnational interconnections. From her office in Berkeley, Calif., Andree Sosler, executive director of the Darfur Stoves Project, coordinates the distribution of cheap, clean, super fuel-efficient cooking stoves to women in the Darfur region of Sudan. Designed by Berkeley scientists, partially manufactured in Mumbai,... Read more

Ed Vine, a scientist in the Environmental Energy Technologies Division is the editor of a special issue of the journal Energy Efficiency focusing solely on the evaluation of energy efficiency (2012: Volume 5 Number 1). The papers published in the issue are a subset of those delivered at the International Energy Program Evaluation Conference held in Europe in 2010.The issue's introduction, by Vine... Read more

The Darfur Stoves Project began in 2005 after a trip by Lab researchers. They were looking at existing wood-burning stoves and what could be done to make them more efficient, requiring less firewood. On this latest trip, Debra found that the idea of U.S.-based researchers thinking about helping an African country came as a surprise:"The group was pleased that I was sharing my first coffee ceremony... Read more

A study released today by researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) identifies steps that energy efficiency program managers can take to deliver significant savings on home energy bills to middle-income households."Middle-income households have been hit hard by the recent recession, and sagging home prices have undermined the traditional reliance of middle-income... Read more

The Department of Defense’s Environmental Security Technology Certification Program (ESTCP) recently announced the funding of 27 projects to demonstrate emerging energy technologies on military installations through its Installation Energy Test Bed initiative.Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s Environmental Energy Technologies Division (EETD) and partner organizations were awarded two of... Read more

Congratulations to Francis Rubinstein and Dennis DiBartolomeo of the Environmental Energy Technologies Division, and Yao-Jun Wen of Philips Research North America. Their paper, "Co-simulation Based Building Controls Implementation with Networked Sensors and Actuators," won the Best Paper Award at the recent BuildSys 2011 meeting. Buildsys 2011 was the 3rd ACM (Association for Computing Machinery)... Read more

Using measuring techniques that combine video with devices measuring particulate matter, black carbon and nitrogen oxides in real time, scientists at the Environmental Energy Technologies Division (EETD) of Berkeley Lab have verified that policies designed to reduce the emissions of particulates from trucks driving onto the Port of Oakland have been effective.The paper describing their results, by... Read more

Researchers estimate that those of us in developed countries spend 90 percent of our time indoors, which means that most of the time we are breathing air polluted by emissions from indoor sources. Providing more outdoor air ventilation can improve indoor air quality; however, energy is needed to heat, cool, humidify or dehumidify, and sometimes filter the ventilation air brought indoors from... Read more

A blog post by Liz Boatman, graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, for the Berkeley Science Review:Just up the hill at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, a handful of UC Berkeley graduate and undergraduate students congregate in warehouse-like Building 60 each week to cook up two gallons of rice and beans, flavored with salt and garlic to taste. The students aren't... Read more

From Liisa O'Neill, Department of Energy, Office of Public Affairs:Who knew leaks could be costing Americans $5 billion every year? And that's not water leaks—it's leaks you can't even see. Typical air duct systems, both residential and commercial, typically lose 25-40 percent of heating and cooling energy, accounting for billions added to utility bills.But what if there was a simple mist that... Read more

KQED Quest covered energy-efficient windows research at Berkeley Lab. EETD researchers Howdy Goudey and Stephen Selkowitz are quoted, along with Delia Milliorin of Berkeley Lab's Molecular Foundry. Read the story and listen to the audio report.... Read more

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory is seeking participants for a study of air quality in California homes. The study is being conducted by scientists in the Environmental Energy Technologies Division of Berkeley Lab. This project is funded by the California Energy Commission and is focused on homes with natural gas appliances. Individuals who are selected to participate and complete the... Read more

A recent Journal of Climate paper by Stanford's Mark Jacobson and John Ten Hoeve (2011) on urban heat islands and cool roofs is a useful contribution to the literature. However, their results regarding white roofs are preliminary and uncertain. Along with our own work at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, other published papers have addressed the broader benefits of white roofs. In our view,... Read more

New materials are crucial to building a clean energy economy—for everything from batteries to photovoltaics to lighter weight vehicles—but today the development cycle is too slow: around 18 years from conception to commercialization. To speed up this process, a team of researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the Massachusetts... Read more