| Building Technology and Urban Systems

About Us +
Researchers in the Building Technology & Urban Systems Division (BTUS) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory develop data and technologies that increase energy efficiency and improve the health, safety and comfort of building occupants, in the United States and worldwide.

We work closely with industry partners, academics and government officials to achieve these goals, and share our research widely
Research +
We are at the forefront of cutting-edge research that redefines building technology and explores all areas of urban systems.

We have been leaders for decades in developing energy-efficient windows, improving indoor air quality, coming up with new ideas to fix the nation's electricity grid, and so much more.

Visit our research areas at the right to find out more.
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Enjoy presentations from Building Technology & Urban systems research experts on a wide variety of topics in the areas of building energy efficiency, the electricity grid and how it relates to buildings and much more.
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Explore our tools, guidebooks and software and download for free.

We offer a variety of technologies designed to simulate and model real-world circumstances to assist in energy-saving programs and help building owners build better buildings. These tools can help calculate performance of building systems like windows and shades, help consumers and builders pick the best windows for a variety of applications and much more.

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2025

Pereira, Flavia deAndrade, Kyriakos Katsigarakis, Dimitrios Rovas, Marco Pritoni, Conor Shaw, Lazlo Paul, Anand Prakash, Susana Martin-Toral, Donal Finn, and James O’Donnell."A semantics-driven framework to enable demand flexibility control applications in real buildings."Advanced Engineering Informatics 64 (2025) 103049. DOI

Paul, Lazlo, Flavia De Andrade Pereira, Anand Prakash, Sang woo Ham, Jingjuan Feng, Rich Brown, and Marco Pritoni."Open building operating system: a grid-responsive semantics-driven control platform for buildings."Science and Technology for the Built Environment 31.3 (2025) 294-311. DOI

2024

Chiosa, Roberto, Marco Savino Piscitelli, Marco Pritoni, and Alfonso Capozzoli."A portable application framework for energy management and information systems (EMIS) solutions using Brick semantic schema."Energy and Buildings 323 (2024) 114802. DOI

Nordman, Bruce, Margarita Kloss, Bijit Kundu, Nate Dewart, Anand Prakash, Laura Wong, Alanna Torres, Rachel Levine, Marco Pritoni, Jordan Shackelford, Heidi Werner, Rahul Athalye, Aditya Khandekar, Callie Clark, Chris Uraine, and Rebecca Aviles."Energy Reporting: Device Demonstration, Communication Protocols, and Codes and Standards." (2024).

Mulayim, Ozan Baris, Lazlo Paul, Marco Pritoni, Anand Prakash, Malavikha Sudarshan, and Gabe Fierro."Large Language Models for the Creation and Use of Semantic Ontologies in Buildings: Requirements and Challenges."Proceedings of the 11th ACM International Conference on Systems for Energy-Efficient Buildings, Cities, and Transportation (2024) 312-317. DOI

Prakash, Anand, Flavia deAndrade Pereira, Mario Bergés, Marco Pritoni, and Burcu Akinci."Ontologies at Work: Analyzing Information Requirements for Model Predictive Control in Buildings."Proceedings of the 11th ACM International Conference on Systems for Energy-Efficient Buildings, Cities, and Transportation (2024) 214-218. DOI

2023

Shackelford, Jordan, Alastair Robinson, Cynthia Regnier, and Sang Hoon Lee."Getting Beyond Widgets: Performance of Efficient Indoor Air Quality System Retrofit Packages for Schools." (2023). DOI

Gehbauer, Christoph, Douglas R Black, and Peter Grant."Advanced control strategies to manage electric vehicle drivetrain battery health for Vehicle-to-X applications."Applied Energy 345 (2023) 121296. DOI

Brown, Richard E, Aditya Khandekar, Jingjing Liu, Bruce Nordman, Jaime Kolln, Steve Widergren, David Narang, Ted Bohn, and Yaosuo Xue."Energy Services Interface: Requirements Document." (2023). DOI

Kolln, Jaime, Jingjing Liu, Steve Widergren, and Richard E Brown."Common Grid Services: Terms and Definitions Report." (2023). DOI

Stübs, Marius, Peter Grant, and Bruce Nordman."Demonstrating Load-Shaping Capabilities of Cost Minimizing Heat Pump Water Heater Controls with Varying Price Profiles."2023 ASHRAE Summer Conference (2023).

Méndez, Juana Isabel, Pedro Ponce, Alan K Meier, Therese Peffer, Omar Mata, and Arturo Molina."Empower saving energy into smart communities using social products with a gamification structure for tailored Human–Machine Interfaces within smart homes."International Journal on Interactive Design and Manufacturing (IJIDeM) 17.3 (2023) 1363 - 1387. DOI

Roa, Carlos Duarte, Paul Raftery, Anand Prakash, and Therese Peffer."Field Demonstration of the Brick Ontology to Scale up the Deployment of ASHRAE Guideline 36 Control Sequences."ASHRAE Annual Conference 2023 (2023). DOI

Grant, Peter, Marius Stübs, Bruce Nordman, and Christoph Gehbauer."Stabilizing the Grid and Reducing Utility Bills Through Price-Responsive Controls for Heat Pump Water Heaters."2023 ASHRAE Summer Conference (2023).

Mata, Omar, Juana Isabel Méndez, Pedro Ponce, Therese Peffer, Alan K Meier, and Arturo Molina."Energy Savings in Buildings Based on Image Depth Sensors for Human Activity Recognition."Energies 16.3 (2023) 1078. DOI

Paul, Lazlo, Sang woo Ham, Marco Pritoni, Donghan Kim, Richard E Brown, and Jingjuan Feng."Field Implementation of MPC for Heat Pump-Based Duel Fuel Systems in Small Commercial Buildings for Decarbonization."ASHRAE (2023).

2022

Liu, Jingjing, Rongxin Yin, Lili Yu, Mary Ann Piette, Marco Pritoni, Armando Casillas, Jiarong Xie, Tianzhen Hong, Monica Neukomm, and Peter Schwartz."Defining and applying an electricity demand flexibility benchmarking metrics framework for grid-interactive efficient commercial buildings."Advances in Applied Energy 8 (2022) 100107. DOI

Grant, Peter, and Christoph Gehbauer."Evaluating the Impacts of Weather Forecast Inaccuracy on Performance of Model Predictive Control for Dynamic Facades."2022 Building Performance Modeling Conference and SimBuild (2022).

Fauchier-Magnan, Nicolas, Joshua Morejohn, and Marco Pritoni."A low-cost centralized HVAC control system solution for energy savings, load shedding, and improved maintenance."2022 Summer Study on Energy Efficiency in Buildings (2022). DOI

Roa, Carlos Duarte, Paul Raftery, Rupam Singla, Marco Pritoni, and Therese Peffer."Detecting Passing Valves at Scale Across Different Buildings and Systems: A Brick Enabled and Mortar Tested Application."2022 Summer Study on Energy Efficiency in Buildings (2022). DOI

Helmns, Dre, Armando Casillas, Anand Prakash, David Blum, Marco Pritoni, Spencer M Dutton, Jonathan Woolley, and Subhrajit Chakraborty."Heat Pumps with Phase Change Thermal Storage: Flexible, Efficient, and Electrification Friendly."2022 Summer Study on Energy Efficiency in Buildings (2022). DOI

Meier, Alan K, Abigail A Daken, and Leo Rainer."Long-term trends in connected thermostat performance."The ECEEE 2022 Summer Study on Energy Efficiency (2022).

Pritoni, Marco, Guanjing Lin, Yimin Chen, John House, Eliot Crowe, and Jessica Granderson."Market Barriers and Drivers for the Next Generation Fault Detection and Diagnostic Tools."2022 Summer Study on Energy Efficiency in Buildings (2022). DOI

Singh, Reshma, Samuel Fernandes, Anand Prakash, Paul A Mathew, Jessica Granderson, Colman Snaith, Rahul Pusapati, Prakash Jadhav, Avideh Zakhor, Rishi Upadhyay, Ozgur Gonen, and Harry Bergmann."Scaling Building Energy Audits through Machine Learning Methods on Novel Drone Image Data."2022 Summer Study on Energy Efficiency in Buildings (2022). DOI

Paul, Lazlo, Anand Prakash, Kun Zhang, Marco Pritoni, and Richard E Brown."SolarPlus Optimizer: Integrated Control of Solar, Batteries, and Flexible Loads for Small Commercial Buildings."2022 ACEEE Summer Study on Energy Efficiency in Buildings (2022).