News

A deep understanding of energy use behavior by occupants in buildings is crucial to the design and operation of buildings to achieve low- or zero-net energy goals. Currently, occupant behavior is under-recognized, compared with the conventional technological solutions, and over-simplified in the design, construction, operation, and retrofit of buildings. Occupant behavior in buildings includes:The... Read more

Two projects from Berkeley Lab's Energy Technologies Area have been named as finalists for R&D Magazine's R&D 100 Awards, which recognize pioneering ideas in science and technology.OP1 from Opus 12, the carbon dioxide recycling startup included in Cyclotron Road's first cohort, and eProject Builder, a system that standardizes data collection for Energy Savings Performance Contract... Read more

A consortium of national labs and nonprofit organizations has announced a call for concepts to engage the smart grid community in demonstrating visionary interoperability capabilities on how facilities with distributed energy resources, or DERs, integrate and interact with the utility grid.Read more at the Berkeley Lab News Center web site:... Read more

After serving four years as Berkeley Lab's Associate Director for Energy Technologies, Ramamoorthy Ramesh will be returning to his research in ultra low-power electronics while also helping to lead a major Berkeley Lab research initiative in next-generation, energy-efficient microelectronics.This new initiative has been dubbed "Beyond Moore's Law," as it seeks the solution to what will happen when... Read more

Ravi Prasher has been appointed Associate Laboratory Director for Energy Technologies at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab). The announcement follows an international search.Prasher, an internationally renowned scientist in the field of thermal energy science and technologies, has been director of Berkeley Lab's Energy Storage and Distributed Resources... Read more

Last month, the US Green Building Council (USGBC), Johnson Controls, and the World Resources Institute (WRI) hosted the “Forum on National-Subnational Collaboration for Building Energy Efficiency,” in Mexico City. The Building Efficiency Accelerator (BEA) event brought together stakeholders from government, industry, development banks, and international cooperation agencies to discuss the role... Read more

About $20 billion worth of energy leaks out of windows in the United States each winter – and that’s with double-paned insulating windows installed on a majority of buildings. The Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) is now working with manufacturers to bring to market a “super window” that is at least twice as insulating as 99 percent of the... Read more

Indoor air quality in schools often fails to meet minimum standards, and student performance is clearly diminished when ventilation rates are low, according to a recent analysis from Lawrence Berkeley National Lab.Elevated concentrations of carbon dioxide have been documented in schools across the U.S., Europe and Asia, the study finds. "These CO2 data indicate a widespread failure to provide the... Read more

U.S. Secretary of Energy Rick Perry and India Minister of Petroleum and Natural Gas Dharmendra Pradhan recently launched a Strategic Energy Partnership that includes a significant intellectual contribution by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab). Building Innovation: Guide For High-Performance Energy-Efficient Buildings in India, is a document packed with best practices for smart,... Read more

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory was recently honored with a prestigious Green Leadership Award at the 12th Annual Green California Summit in Sacramento.The Lab's Energy Technologies Area (ETA) was highlighted for innovative breakthroughs in the energy efficiency category for research aimed at helping California meet its zero net energy (ZNE) building goals, while ensuring adequate indoor air... Read more

Evaluating buildings as a group, rather than individually, can help optimize energy savings in cities. To aid this effort, the Energy Technologies Area’s Tianzhen Hong has introduced CityBES, a data and computing platform that can assess energy efficient retrofits for sets of properties and visualize their performance. He recently assessed 940 buildings in San Francisco. Read the full article in... Read more

Scientists said they were experimenting with using white paint over black asphalt as a way of cutting temperatures in the Phoenix area. Ronnen Levinson of the Energy Technologies Area said it could possibly reduce the heat island effect, a term given to urban areas that are hotter than nearby rural areas. Read the full article at ktar.com.... Read more

A “Living Lab” model led by ETA’s Eleanor Lee received a Climate Leadership Award from the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions. The award recognizes a “Living Lab” partnership between Goldman Sachs, Berkeley Lab, and the Building Energy Exchange. Goldman Sachs reduced energy use by nearly 80 percent in some areas, via smart use of lighting and shading. Read the original "LIving Lab"... Read more

Berkeley Lab-led study suggests early exposure to thirdhand smoke may lead to greater health risks later in life.Researchers at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) identified thirdhand smoke, the toxic residues that linger on indoor surfaces and in dust long after a cigarette has been extinguished, as a health hazard nearly 10 years ago. Now a new... Read more

Universities across the United States have set ambitious goals to shrink their carbon footprints, including the University of California, which launched its Carbon Neutrality Initiative in 2013, aiming for carbon neutrality by 2025. But amid broad support for climate action within the UC system, a big question looms: how to actually hit that target.Now, a 27-member team uniquely comprised of... Read more

Berkeley Lab recently hosted a workshop where 43 faculty members from 32 colleges participated in activities designed to generate ideas for enhancing post-secondary level programs in commercial Heating, Ventilating and Air Conditioning (HVAC), energy management and building automation.This was one day of a four-day annual institute held by the Building Efficiency for a Sustainable Tomorrow Center... Read more

Buildings of the future will operate from models that look at all the factors – outside temperature, the temperature desired inside, how many people are in the building and a number of other set points – to heat and cool buildings in the most energy-efficient manner possible.That was the crux of a recent presentation by Mary Ann Piette, director of the Building Technology & Urban Systems... Read more

Gerald Robinson recently received a 2017 Federal Energy and Water Management Award for his work as part of a federal team that developed an innovative, multi-agency contract solution that saved the government millions of dollars. In the picture, Robinson is fourth from the right.Robinson worked with several agencies to conduct the first-ever aggregated procurement for on-site solar PV arrays. By... Read more

Energy Technology Area researchers ​made extensive contributions to the International Energy Agency's Energy Efficiency 2017 Report. A major focus of the report’s chapter on industrial energy efficiency is ISO 50001 - the internationally developed framework for managing energy as a business practice. Research led by Peter Therkelsen and Berkeley Lab​'​s Industrial Applications Team... Read more

Mary Ann Piette, director of the Building Technology and Urban Systems Division and of the Demand Response Research Center at Berkeley Lab, recently spoke at UC Berkeley about building efficiency. Below is an excerpt and video of her talk.Our homes and buildings consume huge amounts of energy — up to 40 percent of all energy use in the U.S. Research at Berkeley Lab has greatly boosted energy... Read more

A group of officials from the Clean Energy Leadership Institute (CELI) recently visited Berkeley Lab to tour FLEXLAB® and meet with scientists about ongoing research.The visitors were brought here by Sam Fernandes, program manager in Building Technology & Urban Systems. Fernandes was part of the first San Francisco CELI Fellowship cohort and completed the leadership program at the Institute... Read more

The Energy Technology Areas' Industrial Applications team recently contributed to the development of NSF 426, an international standard for environmental leadership in the design and manufacture of computer servers. It includes criteria for certification to ISO5001, which supports market-driven adoption of energy management best practices in manufacturing supply chains.On Friday, Sept. 8, NSF... Read more

Scientific Engineering Associate Arian Aghajanzadeh, of the Building & Industrial Applications Department at Berkeley Lab, has been selected to participate in the highly competitive Clean Energy Leadership Institute's Fall 2017 Fellowship Training Program.The Clean Energy Leadership Institute (CELI) is a leadership development organization based in Washington, D.C. and the San Francisco Bay... Read more

R&D Magazine's R&D 100 Awards, established 54 years ago, recognize 100 technologies and services introduced in the previous year deemed most significant by an independent panel of judges. This year's winners received the awards at a November 3 event in Washington, D.C.The Cool Roof Time Machine simulates soiling and weathering processes in the lab, reproducing in less than three days the... Read more

By using advanced lighting and automated shades, scientists from the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) found that occupants on one floor of a high-rise office building in New York City were able to reduce lighting energy usage by nearly 80 percent in some areas.The dramatic results emerged at a "living laboratory" set up to test four sets of technologies... Read more