News

Governor Jerry Brown has appointed Carla Peterman to the California Energy Commission.Peterman is a doctoral candidate in the Energy and Resources Group, University of California Berkeley and a graduate student researcher with the Environmental Energy Technologies Division of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Her primary research interests are renewable energy, technology innovation, and... Read more

Joe Eto, EETD scientist and principal investigator of the research project, made a statement about the report at a hearing in Washington at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission hearing coinciding with the report's release. From the FERC news release:"The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) today issued for public comment a study that seeks to ensure reliability for consumers by... Read more

Ashok Gadgil, Director of the Environmental Energy Technologies Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory is also a Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at UC Berkeley. Students from his "Design for Sustainable Communities" class, along with other students from City and Regional Planning, Civil Engineering and the Haas School of Business, helped design a net-zero energy... Read more

Buildings are responsible for a large fraction of total U.S. energy demand and buildings are replaced slowly. About one third of the U.S. population lives in multifamily buildings. The residents of multifamily buildings often have below-average incomes and they are sometimes exposed to high levels of potentially harmful indoor contaminants. The U.S. is embarking on a program of aggressive energy... Read more

Purpose: Facilitate OpenADR stakeholders' understanding and comments on draft OpenADR v2.0 profiles. Background: OpenADR is standardized by standards body. The body released draft for public review, ending Dec. 27. Briefing: Update on OpenADR v2.0 within national Smart Grid standards activity, links to OpenADR v1.0, and draft review. Conclusions: Backward compatibility of commercial deployments to... Read more

Environmental Energy Technologies Division researchers at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have released a new study on the installed costs of solar photovoltaic (PV) power systems in the U.S., showing that the average cost of these systems remained largely unchanged from 2008 to 2009, before beginning a steep decline in 2010.The number of solar PV... Read more

Cool-colored roofing materials, developed by researchers at the Environmental Energy Technologies Division, are showcased at a new outdoor display of green technologies just opened in the city of San José just across the street from City Hall.The San José Green Vision Green Energy Showcase kicked off on Wednesday with a ceremony attended by San José Mayor Chuck Reed, Vipin Gupta, a Technical... Read more

Charles Goldman, a scientist in the Environmental Energy Technologies Division, has been given a special award by the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy in recognition of the "Electricity Markets and Policy Group's critical achievements and leadership in the energy efficiency field." Goldman is the leader of this research group.The award was presented at a reception during the... Read more

The following is from the U.S. Department of Energy. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, through its Environmental Energy Technologies Divisionis one of the three DOE National Laboratories participating in this effort:U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu has announced that 24 projects are receiving a total of $21 million in technical assistance to dramatically reduce the energy used in their... Read more

A new museum show about climate change opens at the Chabot Space & Science Center, Oakland, California, on Saturday November 20, 2010: Bill Nye's Climate Lab.Several Berkeley Lab scientists and staff served on the Science Advisory Board of the exhibition, including Allan Chen, Bill Collins, Inez Fung, Susan Jenkins, Michael Levi, Chris Somerville, and Paul Willems.In addition, staff members of... Read more

Vice President Biden joined U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Secretary Steven Chu today to announce the launch of the Home Energy Score pilot program. The Home Energy Score will offer homeowners straightforward, reliable information about their homes' energy efficiency. A report provides consumers with a home energy score between 1 and 10, and shows them how their home compares to others in their... Read more

LAFAYETTE, Calif., Nov. 4, 2010 /PRNewswire/ — A group of demand response (DR) technology vendors demonstrated an end-to-end integration of their demand response technologies using emerging interoperability standards at the 6th annual Utility Integration Conference (UIC2010) in Philadelphia, November 2-3, 2010. UIC is an annual industry technical forum for utility professionals.... Read more

Eric Masanet, deputy leader of the International Energy Studies (IES) Group, was a guest editor of a special issue of Yale's Journal of Industrial Ecology exploring new applications of information and communication technology (ICT) that could save society significant amounts of energy and money, and reduce greenhouse gas emissions that are warming the planet.IES is part of the Environmental Energy... Read more

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's Home Energy Saver website project, and Home Energy magazine, have announced the launch of Home Energy Pros, an open social network for home performance and weatherization professionals.Home Energy Pros connects building professionals and others interested in home energy efficiency by offering an online community for sharing tools, resources, and knowledge... Read more

The OpenADR Alliance has been formed to accelerate the adoption of the Open ADR communications specification as a standard for the smart grid. Supported by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), Honeywell, Pacific Gas & Electric, and Southern California Edison, the Alliance is inviting other interested stakeholders to join them. The OpenADR communications specification... Read more

MORGAN HILL, Calif. — (BUSINESS WIRE) — Leading Smart Grid industry organizations today announced the formation of the OpenADR Alliance, a nonprofit corporation created to foster the development, adoption and compliance of a Smart Grid standard known as Open Automated Demand Response (OpenADR). Smart Grid standards for Automated Demand Response (Auto-DR) will ultimately lower the cost, improve... Read more

The California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) at UC San Diego is operating a set of servers in a campus data center on 380-volt DC (direct current) power. The new modular data center on campus has sensors and other instruments to measure the energy efficiency of information and communication technologies, the infrastructure that supports it - and to help... Read more

Sila Kiliccote, a researcher in the Environmental Energy Technologies Division, has received the 2010 GridWeek Award for Leadership in Smart Grid Acceleration. GridWeek cited Kiliccote for her "leadership, vision, non-traditional approach, ability to create step function vs. incremental change, and willingness to take risk." Gridweek is an annual gathering of Smart Grid stakeholders whose goal is... Read more

The following article was written by Jon Bashor, Berkeley Lab's Computing Sciences Division.A newly approved standard to help reduce energy use by networked devices was driven in part by an informal collaboration between energy efficiency and network experts at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab). The standard, adopted September 30 by IEEE, the world's leading professional... Read more

Research conducted by a team of scientists led by Dustin Poppendieck at Humboldt State University and EETD's Evan Mills shows that kerosene lamps used by more than one-quarter of the world's population in developing nations emit high levels of particulates, resulting in concentrations substantially exceeding ambient health guidelines.The research was published in the journal Indoor Air.... Read more

The U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has been chosen to lead a consortium for a U.S.-China Clean Energy Research Center on Building Energy Efficiency. The Center will develop technologies for low-energy residential and commercial buildings, as well as work on commercialization of those technologies and research how human behavior affects building energy use.The... Read more

Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) released a new study Thursday documenting the design of and early experience with state-level renewables portfolio standard (RPS) programs in the United States that have been specifically designed to encourage solar energy. The study finds that these state-level RPS programs have already proven to... Read more

Hundreds of millions of dollars in public money are flowing into programs to support improvements in home energy efficiency. Ensuring that these funds have their maximum impact by motivating homeowners to seek out home energy improvements is the subject of a new report from researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab)."Convincing millions of Americans to divert their... Read more

When it comes to demand response programs, many customers see a trade-off between cutting costs and retaining control. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Instead, DR is becoming more specialized in many ways, including how the service is delivered.... Read more

Thousands of curious locals, including many children, ascended to the usually off-limits grounds of Berkeley's Ernest Orlando Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory on Saturday, October 2, 2010, at the Lab’s open house.The Lab opened its gates to large numbers of members of the public for the first time in nine years for the event called "It's All About Energy!" which featured tours, talks,... Read more