News

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

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

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

The following article was published today by the University of California, San Diego. William Tschudi and other researchers from the Environmental Energy Technologies Division of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory are participating in this energy-efficient data center demonstration project.San Diego—A consortium of researchers from the public and private sectors have embarked on a real-world... Read more

“Most energy use in personal computers takes place when no one is there,” says Bruce Nordman, a researcher in the Environmental Energy Technologies Division of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab). Summing up what many probably intuit but don’t think much about, PCs are fully on and using considerable energy even if they are idle. This is also true of game consoles and... Read more

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and Pacific Gas & Electric Company were awarded Connectivity Week's Buildy Award earlier this year in Santa Clara, California.According to Connectivity Week, an annual industry trade conference addressing Smart Grid technologies that was held this year in Silicon Valley, the Buildy Awards are presented to "a company or organization that has... Read more

Mary Ann Piette, Deputy Head of EETD's Building Technologies Department, and Research Director of the Demand Response Research Center, has been elected to the Smart Grid Architecture Committee (SGAC). The Committee is responsible for creating and refining a conceptual reference model, including lists of the standards and profiles necessary to implement the Smart Grid.The Committee is part of a... Read more

U.S. Department of Energy Secretary Steven Chu today announced a series of initiatives underway at the Department of Energy to more broadly implement cool roof technologies on DOE facilities and buildings across the federal government. Cool roofs use lighter-colored roofing surfaces or special coatings to reflect more of the sun's heat, helping improve building efficiency by reducing cooling costs... Read more

A team of scientists at Berkeley Lab's Environmental Energy Technologies Division, and their private-sector partners (DuPont, Bosch, 3M, and Proton Energy), have been awarded more than $1.5 million from ARPA-E to research a novel flow battery system for storing energy on the electric grid. The Berkeley Lab researchers are Venkat Srinivasan, Vince Battaglia, and Adam Weber of EETD.EETD is also a... Read more

Berkeley Lab scientists Evan Mills and Rich Brown developed the Home Energy Saver (hes.lbl.gov or HomeEnergySaver.lbl.gov), a free online tool that helps consumers identify the best, most cost-effective ways to save energy and reduce greenhouse gas emissions from their homes. A powerful building energy simulation program is at the core of HES, providing each user with a customized home energy... Read more

The marketplace for Smart Grid technology products is expanding thanks in part to an open-source communications specification developed by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and its research partners.... Read more

As part of an ongoing effort to reduce energy use in new and existing commercial buildings by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), commercial building owners, operators, and technical experts can join DOE's Commercial Building Partnerships (CBP) initiative. Three DOE national laboratories—the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), and the... Read more

A project to improve the energy efficiency of the State of California Franchise Tax Board's data center has won a "Best of California" Award from the Center for Digital Government. Geoffrey Bell, Energy Engineer at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's Environmental Energy Technologies Division, led the project team.The research was funded by the California Energy Commission's Public Interest... Read more

Research by Robert Clear, Francis Rubinstein and Jack Howells of the Environmental Energy Technologies Division suggests that the exposure to mercury in a broken CFL is minimal—equivalent to one bite of albacore tuna—and simple commonsense measures such as opening a window after the breakage and during clean-up are enough to protect room occupants.... Read more

Scientists at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, in cooperation with the International SEMATECH Manufacturing Initiative (ISMI), are releasing for beta testing a computer-based tool to help the world's semiconductor manufacturing facilities ("fabs") evaluate and improve their energy efficiency."We developed FABS21 to allow the operators of semiconductor manufacturing... Read more

Berkeley Lab researchers, in partnership with Silicon Valley firms and the California Energy Commission, have three new energy-efficient data center technologies available for demonstration.... Read more

Advanced energy-efficient technologies in lighting, HVAC (heating, ventilation and air conditioning), and control systems are heading for the buildings, laboratories and data centers of several federal agencies. With $1.8 million in funding from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, experts at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) will provide... Read more

This San Francisco Chronicle article discusses our R&D on building commissioning, and how it can save a commercial building owner millions of dollars in energy costs.... Read more

Hashem Akbari and Surabi Menon, scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), and Art Rosenfeld, California Energy Commissioner, Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, and former Berkeley Lab scientist, have proposed a "Cool World" plan that would use white roofs, and solar-reflective roofs of other colors, to reduce... Read more

The Economist magazine has named California Energy Commissioner Art Rosenfeld recipient of one of this year's Innovation Awards. The weekly British magazine awards Innovation awards in several areas; Rosenfeld won the award in the "Energy and the Environment" sector. A former Berkeley Lab scientist, Rosenfeld was director of the Center for Building Science (Environmental Energy Technologies... Read more

Data centers are the unseen workhorses of the global economy. Their numbers have grown rapidly along with their energy use. Now, the government and the information technology industry are cooperating to develop solutions to the rapid rise in data center energy consumption. This article in the U.S. Department of Energy's Conservation Update covers research and program efforts to increase the energy... Read more

Employees of The New York Times Company (The Times) began occupying their new headquarters on the west side of Manhattan in mid-2007. Three years before this milestone, The Times's facility team had approached building scientists at Berkeley Lab's Environmental Energy Technologies Division (EETD), looking for help. They were searching for reliable and affordable technologies, not yet available in... Read more