News

Berkeley Lab Researcher Played Significant Role In Its DevelopmentJune 15, 2011—A significant new standard to help organizations save energy, "ISO 50001 Energy management systems- Requirements with guidance for use," was released today by the International Organization for Standardization.ISO 50001 can be used by any organization to manage its energy use. Targeting broad applicability across... Read more

Washington, DC — The U.S. Department of Energy today announced that Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) have joined with Dow Chemical Company as part of a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement to fund key research that will help develop the next generation of cool roof technologies in the U.S. The agreement will support research to... Read more

Two speakers at this free, open-to-the-public class at the Pacific Energy Center of PG&E in San Francisco are scientists at the Environmental Energy Technologies Division of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.Information Visualization in Commercial Buildings: Design, Technology, and Human Behavior April 13 (Wednesday, 9:00 am to 4:30 pm), San Francisco, Pacific Energy CenterJessica... Read more

That fancy programmable thermostat on your living room wall, the one with a backlit digital screen, several tiny buttons, and unintelligible instruction manual, may be making it more difficult to save energy.A research team at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) is beginning to figure out why. They are determining how to measure the usability of a thermostat—that is, the... Read more

Not long ago, Japan faced a major power crisis. In September 2002, the Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) was forced to shut down 17 nuclear power plants for emergency safety inspections.The winter of 2002-2003 was approaching, and the plants, which were expected to remain closed for months, would be unavailable through summer 2003, a time when demand from summertime air conditioning would... Read more

The Demand Response Research Center recently posted several one-page PDFs about its recent work. Following is one of these on the OpenADR specification and job creation.Open Automated Demand Response (OpenADR) is an information exchange model that facilitates reliable and cost-effective automation of both electricity price and system grid reliability signals to support demand response (DR).... Read more

Consulting firm RoseRyan has published a list of the top 25 movers and shakers in cleantech (2010), as well as a list of 15 people to watch in 2011.Mary Ann Piette, Deputy Leader of the Building Technologies Department was recognized as one of the 25. Piette is also the research director of the Demand Response Research Center, which is funded by the California Energy Commission's Public Interest... Read more

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) held its first members' meeting at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), January 20-21.Automated demand response is a set of pre-programmed steps in a building or other facility, which automatically... 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

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

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