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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Publications +
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.
- Presentations
News
Tools & Guides +
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.

Publications

Publications By Research Area

2019

Rao, Prakash, Darren Sholes, and Joe Cresko."Evaluation of U.S. Manufacturing Subsectors at Risk of Physical Water Shortages."Environmental Science & Technology (2019). DOI

Wang, Wei, Tianzhen Hong, Nan Li, Ryan Qi Wang, and Jiayu Chen."Linking energy-cyber-physical systems with occupancy prediction and interpretation through WiFi probe-based ensemble classification."Applied Energy 236 (2019) 55 - 69. DOI

Blum, David, K. Arendt, Lisa Rivalin, Mary Ann Piette, Michael Wetter, and C.T. Veje."Practical factors of envelope model setup and their effects on the performance of model predictive control for building heating, ventilating, and air conditioning systems."Applied Energy 236 (2019) 410 - 425. DOI

Satre-Meloy, Aven, and Jared Langevin."Assessing the time-sensitive impacts of energy efficiency and flexibility in the US building sector."Environmental Research Letters 14.12 (2019) 124012. DOI

Luo, Na, Wenguo Weng, Xiaoyu Xu, Tianzhen Hong, Ming Fu, and Kaiyu Sun."Assessment of occupant-behavior-based indoor air quality and its impacts on human exposure risk: A case study based on the wildfires in Northern California."Science of The Total Environment 686 (2019) 1251 - 1261. DOI

Van Cutsem, Olivier, Maher Kayal, David Blum, and Marco Pritoni."Comparison of MPC Formulations for Building Control under Commercial Time-of-Use Tariffs."IEEE PowerTech Milan 2019 (2019).

Wang, , Wei, Tianzhen Hong, Ning Xu, Xiaodong Xu, Jiayu Chen, and Xiaofang Shan."Cross-source sensing data fusion for building occupancy prediction with adaptive lasso feature filtering."Building and Environment 162 (2019) 106280. DOI

Granderson, Jessica, Guanjing Lin, David Blum, Janie Page, Michael Spears, and Mary Ann Piette."Integrating diagnostics and model-based optimization."Energy and Buildings 182 (2019) 187 - 195. DOI

Li, , Han, Tianzhen Hong, and Marina Sofos."An inverse approach to solving zone air infiltration rate and people count using indoor environmental sensor data."Energy and Buildings 198 (2019) 228 - 242. DOI

Wang, Zhe, and Tianzhen Hong."Learning occupants’ indoor comfort temperature through a Bayesian inference approach for office buildings in United States."Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews (2019) 109593. DOI

Langevin, Jared."Longitudinal dataset of human-building interactions in U.S. offices."Scientific Data 6.1 (2019). DOI

Meier, Alan K.."New standby power targets."Energy Efficiency 12.1 (2019) 175 - 186. DOI

Widergren, Steve, Ron Melton, Aditya Khandekar, Bruce Nordman, and Mark Knight."The Plug-and-Play Electricity Era: Interoperability to Integrate Anything, Anywhere, Anytime."IEEE Power and Energy Magazine 17.5 (2019) 47 - 58. DOI

Xu, , Xiaodong, Chenhuan Yin, Wei Wang, Ning Xu, Tianzhen Hong, and Qi Li."Revealing Urban Morphology and Outdoor Comfort through Genetic Algorithm-Driven Urban Block Design in Dry and Hot Regions of China."Sustainability 11.13 (2019) 3683. DOI

Touzani, Samir, Baptiste Ravache, Eliot Crowe, and Jessica Granderson."Statistical change detection of building energy consumption: Applications to savings estimation."Energy and Buildings 185 (2019) 123 - 136. DOI

Hart, Robert, Stephen E. Selkowitz, and D. Charlie Curcija."Thermal performance and potential annual energy impact of retrofit thin-glass triple-pane glazing in US residential buildings."Building Simulation 12.1 (2019) 79 - 86. DOI

Lee, , Sang Hoon, and Tianzhen Hong."Validation of an inverse model of zone air heat balance."Building and Environment 161 (2019) 106232. DOI

Chen, Yixing, Tianzhen Hong, Xuan Luo, and Barry Hooper."Development of city buildings dataset for urban building energy modeling."Energy and Buildings 183 (2019) 252 - 265. DOI

Poskanzer, Deborah, Alan K. Meier, Margarita Kloss, and Chinmayee Subban."Dressing for the Anthropocene*: A Future History." (2019).

Meier, Alan K., Richard E. Brown, Daniel L. Gerber, Aditya Khandekar, Margarita Kloss, Hidemitsu Koyanagi, Richard Liou, Leo I. Rainer, and Seth Sanders."Efficient and Zero Net Energy-Ready Plug Loads." (2019).

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." (2019).

Gendler, Isaac, Mara Leandro, Ramina Albazi, Rodrigo Henriquez, Josh Sanghvi, Reshma Singh, Gayathri Aaditya Eranki, and Sohail H. Zaidi."Evaluation of an Integrated Pipe Water Cooling Strategy to Improve BIPV Structure Performance."ASES National Solar Conference (2019).

Salzman, Madeline, Michael Specian, Jared Langevin, Harry Bergmann, and Aven Satre-Meloy."Grid-interactive, efficient buildings: expanding value streams through optimized control of flexible building technologies." (2019).

de Bakker, Christel, Marielle Aarts, Helianthe Kort, Alan K. Meier, and Alexander Rosemann."Local lighting control in open-plan offices: the influence of office lay-out."20th Congress of the International Ergonomics Association (IEA 2018) (2019).

Blum, David, Filip Jorissen, Sen Huang, Yan Chen, Javier Arroyo, Kyle Benne, Yanfei Li, Valentin Gavan, Lisa Rivalin, Lieve Helsen, Draguna Vrabie, Michael Wetter, and Marina Sofos."Prototyping the BOPTEST Framework for Simulation-Based Testing of Advanced Control Strategies in Buildings."IBPSA Building Simulation 2019 (2019).