News

Sunlight-reflecting “cool walls” have been shown to reduce energy costs by lowering heat gain in buildings. But they do more – reflective walls can also cool cities, fighting the urban heat island effect. The concept has new support from the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC), which has issued a pilot credit for the installation of cool exterior walls in new homes, schools, and commercial... Read more

Newborn babies, particularly those born under-weight or preterm, are susceptible to hypothermia, since newborns are not yet able to maintain their own body heat. Hypothermia is recognized to be a significant contributor to newborn disease and death, particularly in low- and middle-income countries. The World Health Organization and public health leaders have recommended best practices to prevent... Read more

Remote and island communities face high energy costs and vulnerable energy infrastructures, and are at increased risk of natural disasters and climate change impacts. Sustainable solutions that emphasize holistic energy planning are of paramount importance, yet advancing energy transition plans for these small communities is often difficult due to limited resources or capacity. The Department of... Read more

Mary Ann Piette, Berkeley Lab expert in building technology and energy efficiency, recently took part in an interview with “The Hill” on the “Sustainability Imperative” during a multi-day virtual event. Host Steve Clemons, editor-at-large for The Hill, pointed out that energy consumption in buildings is of primary importance because buildings account for more than 40% of energy use in the... Read more

A Q&A with Berkeley Lab researcher Hanna Breunig on technoeconomic analysis, and how she uses it to make negative emissions technologies more competitive For new energy technologies, the time elapsed from when a breakthrough is made in a laboratory setting until when it is validated, scaled up, piloted, and then widely commercialized can be years or even decades. But in the race to avoid the... Read more

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) recently received a federal award for its participation in 50001 Ready, a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) program administered by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab). NASA won a Director’s Award from DOE’s Federal Energy Management Program (FEMP) for its “headquarters-driven, agency-wide commitment to implementing the... Read more

After several years of a research and development relationship, one of the largest window and door replacement companies in the U.S. announced the national launch of a new high-performance glass option for select replacement windows. The new glass option offers a “thin-glass” triple-pane glazing element that makes the window five times more insulating than a single-pane window, based upon a... Read more

More than 300 people attended the 2021 Annual Institute conference, with this year’s event focused on sustaining healthy and energy efficient buildings through technician education. Key presentations were given by Lawrence Berkeley National Labortaory (Berkeley Lab) staff, including Mary Ann Piette, pictured, Division Director of Building Technology & Urban Systems (BTUS) in the Energy... Read more

Heating and cooling buildings is a large part of global energy demand and a significant source of CO2 and greenhouse gas emissions, and in the coming decades the energy demand for heating and cooling - also known as thermal energy - is expected to grow considerably. Scientists and engineers have made many advances in lowering building energy demand by improving energy efficiency in building... Read more

The Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) has named Rachel Slaybaugh, associate professor of nuclear engineering at UC Berkeley, to lead Berkeley Lab’s Cyclotron Road Division. The announcement follows an international search. Until recently, Slaybaugh served as a program director at DOE’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E), whose mission... Read more

Eight IMPEL+ Innovators recently pitched their technologies at two prestigious national events in the past month, showcasing inventive ideas to industry and government experts and investors, aimed at making U.S. buildings smarter, more energy-efficient, and grid-responsive. IMPEL+, Incubating Market-Propelled Entrepreneurial-Mindset at the Labs and Beyond, is a unique program funded by the U.S.... Read more

Applications are now open for building and energy technology scientists and innovators to participate in a unique incubator that helps propel your ideas to market. While millions of dollars are spent for R&D and small businesses for energy technologies, only a portion of these reach users and create value. The Incubating Market-Propelled Entrepreneurial-mindset at the Labs (IMPEL) is a... Read more

One hundred and four U.S. companies, schools, governments, and institutions are taking their building energy savings to a new level with the Department of Energy’s Smart Energy Analytics Campaign, a four-year initiative funded through the Building Technologies Office and facilitated by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) to expand the use of energy management and information... Read more

Hydrogen fuel cells are on the rise: Germany has rolled out hydrogen-powered trains, the San Francisco Bay Area will soon see the nation’s first hydrogen fuel cell ferry, and sales of fuel-cell vehicles are up globally. It’s a technology with the potential to provide a variety of clean energy options, especially in transportation.Now the Department of Energy has announced several major... Read more

With a day job as deputy of research for Building Technology and Urban Systems Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and another full-time job as a parent to a young child, Jessica Granderson still found more time to carve out of her schedule this year to help design face shields for hospital staff.“Back in March when we were initially confronting our regional surge in... Read more

The Energy Technologies Area (ETA) won three R&D 100 awards in the areas of higher energy efficiency in buildings, making lithium batteries safer and development of an innovative tool; all together the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) took home seven awards. For more than 50 years, the annual R&D 100 Awards have recognized 100 technologies of the... Read more

Air sealing and insulation, which are common elements of energy efficiency upgrade packages, come with a bonus: In addition to saving energy, they almost always cut dampness and mold. This latest research comes from a new publication from the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (Berkeley Lab). However, the paper also found that levels of some indoor air pollutants increased... Read more

Kristin Persson, a senior faculty scientist in the Energy Storage & Distributed Resources Division within the Energy Technologies Area at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and director of the Materials Project, has been named director of the Molecular Foundry. Her new appointment is effective August 15, 2020. She will continue to hold an appointment as a professor of... Read more

Commercial building retrofits present a prime opportunity to improve building energy efficiency, and numerous industry and policy stakeholders are increasingly pushing for these retrofits to happen. However, a recent study by the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) found that most commercial building retrofits are actually simple upgrades of... Read more

A grant of nearly $2 million was recently awarded to install energy-saving, thin-glass triple-pane windows in low-income communities in California. Thanks to years of investment and support from the California Energy Commission (CEC) and the Department of Energy (DOE), this project will work with industry partners to deploy superior windows in California homes. Windows are often referred to as the... Read more

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Technology Commercialization Fund has awarded $1 million to four projects from Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (Berkeley Lab) to further collaborative research with industry partners on biofuels, bioproducts, energy microgrid technology, and renewable energy technology.Two of those projects are from Berkeley Lab’s Energy Technologies Area: Expand Access to... Read more

FLEXLAB®, the world’s most advanced building simulator and testbed, will be used to simulate office and school heating, ventilation, and air conditioning configurations. (Credit: Berkeley Lab)As society prepares to reopen indoor spaces and ease back into some sense of normalcy during the COVID-19 pandemic, a team of researchers at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National... Read more

The volume of data researchers can collect on how buildings use energy has changed dramatically in recent years, and that is transforming approaches to energy efficiency. Mary Ann Piette, director of the Building Technology and Urban Systems division at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (Berkeley Lab), discusses this shift and other trends in building energy efficiency... Read more

Smart windows that track the position of the sun and automatically dim to block out glare and heat sound futuristic, but many architects and engineers are already starting to integrate them into the design of new homes and commercial buildings. San Francisco International Airport, for example, is installing one of the largest dynamic window installations in an airport in the world. Researchers... Read more

Extreme weather events – such as severe drought, storms, and heat waves – have been forecast to become more commonplace and are already starting to occur. What has been less studied is the impact on energy systems and how communities can avoid costly disruptions, such as partial or total blackouts. Now an international team of scientists has published a new study proposing an optimization... Read more