EETD Communications

The Lemelson-MIT Program today announced Dr. Ashok Gadgil as the recipient of the 2012 $100,000 Lemelson-MIT Award for Global Innovation in recognition of his steady pursuit to blend research, invention, and humanitarianism for broad social impact. Gadgil is the Director of the Environmental Energy Technologies Division of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), and a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of California, Berkeley.

“I am honored and thrilled that the Lemelson-MIT Program has chosen to recognize innovations to help improve lives of poor people in the developing world,” said Gadgil. “We can make a positive difference to the lives of large numbers of people by addressing big problems with low-cost but high-impact innovative solutions.”

Gadgil’s inventions and innovations are improving the livelihood of more than 100 million people in more than 41 countries on four continents, with estimated annual societal economic benefits exceeding $5 billion/year.

He developed UV Waterworks, a technology for developing countries that uses ultraviolet light to inexpensively disinfect drinking water. UV Waterworks earned Gadgil the Discover Award in 1996 for the most significant environmental invention of the year, as well as the Popular Science award for “Best of What is New–1996.” UV Waterworks is now deployed in villages by WaterHealth International Inc. It provides affordable, safe drinking water to more than four million people in India, the Philippines, Nigeria, Liberia and Ghana, with plans for expansion to Bangladesh. Gadgil estimates that with five million people served, UV Waterworks would now annually avoid about 1,000 statistical deaths of children from diarrheal diseases in the serviced population.

Current projects by his research team include developing low-cost ways of removing high levels of naturally occurring arsenic from groundwater used for drinking, a serious problem in rural Bangladesh, neighboring parts of India, and some other parts of the world.

His research team developed a fuel-efficient stove for Darfur to help reduce the firewood demand of Darfur displaced persons, most of whom are women at risk of violence as they forage for firewood outside of camp boundaries. To date, more than 20,000 Berkeley-Darfur Stoves have been distributed, helping 125,000 displaced women and their dependents. A survey in 2010 in North Darfur found that the $20 stove saves $330 in fuel costs annually for each recipient household. Thus, over their five-year estimated life, the 20,000 stoves will save $33 million for the recipient households. Gadgil is currently working on an iteration of the stove for dissemination in Ethiopia.

The utility-sponsored compact fluorescent lamp leasing programs that he pioneered are being successfully implemented in 38 countries in Eastern Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

Gadgil has received several other awards and honors for his work, including the Pew Fellowship in Conservation and the Environment in 1991 for his work on accelerating energy efficiency in developing countries, the World Technology Award for Energy in 2002, the Tech Laureate Award in 2004, the Heinz Award in 2009, the European Inventor Award in 2011, and the Zayed Future Energy Prize for sustainable energy in early 2012.

He serves on several international and national advisory committees dealing with energy efficiency, invention and innovation, and issues of development and the environment. During the 2004-2005 academic year Dr. Gadgil was the MAP/Ming Visiting Professor in Civil and Environmental Engineering at Stanford University.

The Lemelson-MIT Program celebrates outstanding innovators and inspires young people to pursue creative lives and careers through invention. http://web.mit.edu/invent/

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory addresses the world’s most urgent scientific challenges by advancing sustainable energy, protecting human health, creating new materials, and revealing the origin and fate of the universe. Founded in 1931, Berkeley Lab’s scientific expertise has been recognized with 13 Nobel prizes. The University of California manages Berkeley Lab for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science. For more, visit www.lbl.gov.

Read the Lemelson MIT press announcement here.

Ashok Gadgil’s web page.

Darfur stoves project http://darfurstoves.org

Arsenic removal research http://arsenic.lbl.gov

UV Waterworks and Waterhealth International http://www.waterhealth.com

Energy efficient lighting for the developing world http://www.enlighten-initiative.org

Wednesday, May 30, 2012
8:00 am – 4:00 pm

Microsoft Auditorium, 1288 Pear Ave., Mountain View, CA  (map)

The Environmental Energy Technologies Division of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory is an event partner with Joint Venture Silicon Valley of the Silicon Valley Energy Storage Symposium.

This symposium will bring together key participants—from the public and private sectors and from the academic and research communities—to engage in a discussion about energy storage and how we can move the industry forward in Silicon Valley.

On the agenda are updates on energy storage at the state and federal levels, as well as a fresh look at the local energy storage industry. The symposium will also include panel discussions about the role of storage on the grid in relation to transmission and generation, and the decision-making process for implementing storage technologies from an end-user perspective.

You will hear presentations from Federal Energy Regulatory Commissioner Cheryl A. LaFleur, Steve Berberich, President and Chief Executive Officer of the California Independent System Operator, and Imre Gyuk, Energy Storage Research Program Manager for the U.S. Department of Energy. Also scheduled are updates on energy storage at the state and federal levels, as well as a fresh look at the local energy storage industry; panel discussions about the role of storage on the grid in relation to transmission and generation; and the decision-making process for implementing storage technologies from an end-user perspective.

Register

A report released by the California Council for Science and Technology examines pathways for achieving California’s aggressive greenhouse gas (GHG) reduction target of 80% below the 1990 level in 2050 through electricity generation from fossil fuel combustion with CO₂ capture and sequestration (“fossil/CCS”), or renewable energy technologies (wind, solar, geothermal, biomass, hydro, etc.).  The report is titled “California’s Energy Future: Electricity from Renewable Energy and Fossil Fuels with Carbon Capture and Sequestration.”

The report by Jane Long, co-chair of California’s Energy Futures Committee, Jeffery Greenblatt of the Environmental Energy Technologies Division at LBNL, and Bryan Hannegan of the Electric Power Research Institute, is a follow-up to the study “California’s Energy Future— The View to 2050,” published in May 2011. The analysis first estimated how emissions could be reduced through modifications to demand, including aggressive efficiency and electrification.

The authors developed two scenarios of electricity demand in the state through 2050. In the first, they assumed that maximum electricity demand that would result from business-as-usual plus economic and population growth without aggressive efficiency measures, but very high levels of electrification. In this case the total demand for electricity would be about 1,200 terawatt-hours/year (TWh/yr), with average generation of about 130 gigawatts (GW). In the second case, they used a much smaller estimate of demand that included aggressive, but realistic, amounts of both efficiency improvement and electrification in all energy sectors. The resulting demand for electricity is about 500 TWh/yr, with average generation of about 60 GW. By comparison, California’s electricity demand in 2005 was about 270 TWh/yr.

The report assumes there are three major ways to provide the rest of the electricity: nuclear power, fossil/CCS, and more renewable energy, and focuses on the latter two solutions. There is also a section exploring approaches for implementing load balancing without GHG emissions.

The report concludes that:

• Developing generation capacity is not a technical issue. Generation capacity to meet either the high or low level of demand could be developed with any of the three electricity supply choices.

• All of the electricity cases require load balancing to address peaking, ramping and intermittency of electricity supply resulting from the inherent variability of wind and solar resources. The use of natural gas for load balancing at the scales envisioned to be necessary in 2050 would produce significant amounts of GHG emissions. This problem is significantly larger for intermittent renewable energy.

The California Council on Science and Technology is publishing a series of reports detailing the results of its Clean Energy Futures project exploring the remaining challenges—and possible solutions—to achieving California’s ambitious GHG target. This is the third follow-up to its initial Summary Report published last year. Additional reports will be released later this year.

Download the report “California’s Energy Future: Electricity from Renewable Energy and Fossil Fuels with Carbon Capture and Sequestration” from the California Council on Science and Technology website:  http://www.ccst.us/

Download the report.

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) has been selected to lead a new joint U.S.-India research center focusing on energy efficiency technologies for buildings. It is one of three consortia that will make up the U.S.-India Joint Clean Energy Research and Development Center (JCERDC). Together, these three groups will receive a total of $5 million this year from the U.S. Department of Energy to develop clean energy technologies.

Berkeley Lab’s U.S.-India Joint Center for Building Energy Research and Development (CBERD) will conduct research with Indian counterparts focused on the integration of information technology with building systems in commercial and high-rise residential buildings. This area offers enormous potential for reducing energy use in both countries and is of particular importance in India, which experiences critical shortages in its energy supply coupled with booming demand.

Read the rest.

U.S. Department of Energy press release.

Cap and trade programs to reduce emissions do not inherently provide incentives to induce the private sector to develop innovative technologies to address climate change, according to a study just published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

In fact, said author Margaret Taylor, a researcher at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) who conducted the study while an assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy, the success of some cap and trade programs in achieving pre-determined pollution reduction targets at low cost seems to have reduced incentives for research and development that could help develop more appropriate pollution control targets. Taylor is a scientist in the Environmental Energy Technologies Division of Berkeley Lab.

“Policymakers rarely see with perfect foresight what the appropriate emissions targets are to protect the public health and environment – the history is that these targets usually need to get stricter,” said Taylor. “Yet policymakers also seldom set targets they don’t have evidence that industry can meet. This is where R&D that can lead to the development of innovative technologies over the longer term is essential.”

In the study, Taylor explored the relationship between innovation and cap and trade programs (CTPs). She used empirical data from the world’s two most successful CTPs, the U.S. national market for sulfur dioxide (SO₂) control, and the northeast and mid-Atlantic States’ market for nitrogen oxide (NOx) control. (Respectively, Title IV of the 1990 Clean Air Act, and the Ozone Transport Commission/ NOx Budget Program.)

Taylor’s research shows that before trading began for these CTPs, analysts overestimated how difficult it would be for emissions sources to achieve targets, in a pattern frequently observed in environmental health, safety, and energy efficiency regulation, including all of the world’s CTPs. This was seen in overestimates of the value of allowances, which are permits to release a certain volume of emissions under a CTP. If an entity can reduce emissions cheaply, they can either sell these allowances for whatever price they can get on the market or they can bank these allowances to meet later emissions restrictions.

The cap-and-trade programs Taylor studied exhibited lower-than-expected allowance prices, in part because program participants adopted an unexpected range of approaches for reducing emissions sources in the lead-up to trading. A large bank of allowances grew in response, particularly in the SO₂ program, signaling that allowance prices would remain relaxed for many years.

But this low price message did not cause the policy targets in the CTPs to change, despite evidence that it would not only be cheaper than expected to meet these targets, but it would also be more important to public health to tighten the targets, based on scientific advances. The lower-than-expected price signal did cause emissions sources to reassess their clean technology investments, however, and led to significant cancellations, Taylor reported.

Meanwhile, the low price also signaled to innovators working to develop clean technologies – which are often distinct from the emissions sources that hold allowances – that potential returns to their research and development  programs, which generally have uncertain and longer-term payoffs, would be lower than expected.

This effect also helps explain the study’s finding that patenting activity, the dominant indicator of commercially-oriented research and development, peaked before these CTPs were passed and then dropped once allowance markets began operating, reaching low levels not seen since national SO₂ and NOx regulation began in 1970.

“There are usually relatively cheap and easy things to do at the start of any new environmental policy program,” said Taylor, who specializes in policy analysis, environmental and energy policy, and innovation. “But if doing these things has the tradeoff of dampening the incentives for longer-term innovation, there can be a real problem, particularly when dramatic levels of technological change are needed, such as in the case of stabilizing the global climate.”

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More information:

Innovation Under Cap and Trade Programs, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,

http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/03/08/1113462109

Margaret Taylor’s research: http://eetd.lbl.gov/taylor/

Space is limited, so be sure to secure your room as soon as possible.  Be sure to check back regularly for conference updates at the Beyond Lithium Ion V website. We look forward to seeing you at the conference!

A new study from scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), published in Nature Climate Change, has quantitatively demonstrated that black carbon—also known as soot, a pollutant emitted from power plants, diesel engines and residential cooking and heating, as well as forest fires—reduces the reflectance of snow and ice, an effect that increases the rate of global climate change.

Soot can travel great distances and settle back to earth in remote areas far from the emission source. If it deposits on snow-covered areas such as the poles or glaciers, it darkens the snow and ice, with the result that less solar radiation is reflected back into space. More heat is retained near the earth’s surface, speeding up global warming.

Although computer models of global climate have estimated this effect, the impact of soot on snow and ice albedo had not been thoroughly measured until now.

Read the rest:

http://newscenter.lbl.gov/news-releases/2012/03/05/snow-albedo/

The Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) is establishing the new LBNL Institute for Globally Transformative Technologies (LIGTT) to close the innovation gap for developing countries and create a pipeline of demand-driven technologies in the key areas for international development, including fuel-efficient cook-stoves, safe drinking water and access to electricity. These technologies will fight global poverty in an environmentally sustainable way by matching Berkeley Lab’s advanced research capabilities in affordable, low-carbon solutions with the needs of developing countries, particularly those in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, home to the vast majority of people living on less than $1.25 per day. Through locally appropriate business models, the Institute will work with carefully selected partners to deploy these technology solutions and bridge the gulf between their invention in the lab and their arrival in the marketplace.

Through our existing partners (WaterHealth International, Oxfam America and Darfur Stoves Project), LBNL’s technologies are active in eight countries in Asia and Africa. These organizations are excited about new opportunities to partner with LIGTT to deploy critical new technologies to the developing world.

Read the White House press release.

Read the Berkeley Lab press release.

LBNL Institute for Globally Transformative Technologies (LIGTT) website.

Ashok Gadgil, Director of the Environmental Energy Technologies Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, answers some questions about LIGTT here.

More information

One of the quickest, most inexpensive paths to increasing gas mileage and reducing vehicle carbon dioxide emissions is to reduce vehicle weight, rather than investing in new, expensive vehicle technologies. Concerns that reducing vehicle weight will result in increased fatalities from vehicle accidents have hindered past efforts to substantially increase fuel economy standards, but recent research results, including those of Tom Wenzel, a research scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s Environmental Energy Technologies Division (EETD), are challenging this assumption. If analyses can show that vehicle manufacturers can lower vehicle weight safely, then corporate average fuel economy (CAFE) standards can be strengthened without undue cost to consumers.

Wenzel’s role in examining the relationship between vehicle weight and traffic fatalities began years ago, when the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration (NHTSA) published its first studies on the subject in 1997 and 2003. While reviewing the results of those studies, he noticed some shortcomings.

“The reports’ conclusions weren’t necessarily based on their analytical results,” he recalls.

So, supported by several foundations, he reviewed and commented on the earlier studies. Then, when the most recent rulemaking to raise CAFE standards began, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) funded him to analyze the most recent NHTSA analysis, and also to look at independent data on the relationship between reductions in vehicle weight and casualty risk (which addresses both fatalities and serious incapacitating injuries) per vehicle crash.

Read the rest here.

Ashok Gadgil, the Director of the Environmental Energy Technologies Division of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), has won the Lifetime Achievement award of the Zayed Future Energy Prize. The award was announced in Abu Dhabi at the Zayed award ceremony today.

The $3.5 million Zayed Future Energy Prize, managed by Masdar in Abu Dhabi, recognizes and rewards innovation, leadership, and long-term vision in renewable energy and sustainability. The award is named in honor of Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, the late ruler of Abu Dhabi and the founding father of the United Arab Emirates, who made environmental protection a part of his legacy. The 2012 Zayed Future Energy Prize was presented to three winners and two runners up at the awards ceremony held in Emirates Palace.

The Zayed Prize organization said that “All three finalists excelled in demonstrating clear impact through their work in disseminating solutions to further knowledge, creating awareness, as well as developing policies and technologies in renewable energy and sustainability.”

Other award winners included the UK’s Carbon Disclosure Project in the Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) & Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) category. India’s Orb Energy and Environmental Defense Fund of the United States were first and second runners-up respectively in the same category. French company Schneider Electric received a Recognition Award in the Large Corporations category. Gadgil’s share of the award was $500,000.

Ashok Gadgil released the following statement on winning the Zayed Future Energy Prize’s Lifetime Achievement award:

“Being selected the winner for the Zayed prize is a great honor and tremendous validation of my lifelong passion and efforts for energy innovation and sustainability.

“Looking at the list of past prize winners and runners up—some of whose work I know well—I am impressed with the energy and ingenuity of this group, and I hope that we can work together, and inspire many others, to advance the aim of the Zayed Future Energy Prize—energy sustainability for the planet.

“Vigorous efforts and political leadership are needed to make the concept of sustainability an integral part of policy decisions. Energy sustainability is a critical and integral part of the sustainability for the planetary ecosystem and of the human economic system, and we need to work quickly to forestall irreversible damage to the Earth’s ecosystem and to human well-being.

“Winning the Zayed Energy Prize deepens my commitment to energy innovation for sustainability. Together with my colleagues and co-workers, I will continue to advance the research, design, testing, and scale-up of fuel-efficient low-emission stoves for about three billion people (mostly women) that use biomass for cooking.  I will also continue to efforts to innovate, field test, demonstrate, and help scale-up the technology for arsenic remediation of drinking water for close to 100 million people in Bangladesh, West Bengal, and tens of millions of others elsewhere poisoned with arsenic in their drinking water.”

In addition to being Director of the Environmental Energy Technologies Division of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Gadgil is a Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at UC Berkeley. He has substantial experience in technical, economic, and policy research on energy efficiency and its implementation—particularly in developing countries. For example, the utility-sponsored compact fluorescent lamp leasing programs that he pioneered are being successfully implemented by utilities in several east-European and developing countries. He has several patents and inventions to his credit, among them the “UV Waterworks,” a technology to inexpensively disinfect drinking water in the developing countries, for which he received the Discover Award in 1996 for the most significant environmental invention of the year, as well as the Popular Science award for “Best of What is New–1996.” In recent years, he has worked on ways to inexpensively remove arsenic from Bangladesh drinking water, and on fuel-efficient stoves for Darfur.

Dr. Gadgil has received several other awards and honors for his work, including the Pew Fellowship in Conservation and the Environment in 1991 for his work on accelerating energy efficiency in developing countries, the World Technology Award for Energy in 2002, the Tech Laureate Award in 2004, the Heinz Award in 2009, the European Inventor Award in 2011.

More about Ashok Gadgil.

Read the Zayed Future Energy Prize Announcement here.

Zayed Future Energy Prize website: http://www.zayedfutureenergyprize.com/

The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and U.S. Department of Energy have released The Energy Information Handbook: Applications for Energy-Efficient Buildings Operations. This free book guides commercial building owners and operators who have no experience with energy information systems in understanding how to analyze the energy use of buildings, and use their analysis to lower energy costs by operating buildings more efficiently. Software developers and energy service providers in the commercial building industry, as well as more experienced owners and managers who wish to improve how they visualize, analyze, and manage their build­ing’s energy use, will also find the book useful.

From the Introduction:

“There are a wealth of methods and tools to monitor and measure building energy use (both over the long haul and in real time) and to identify where best to focus your energy-efficiency efforts. But with so many options, where do you start? This handbook will give you the information you need to plan an energy-management strategy that works for your building, making it more energy efficient.”

The handbook was written by Jessica Granderson, Mary Ann Piette, Ben Rosenblum, and Lily Hu of the Environmental Energy Technologies Division of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and Dan Harris of New Buildings Institute.

Download a PDF http://eis.lbl.gov/downloads/energy-information-handbook.pdf

Learn more at the Energy Information Systems website.

In addition to the handbook, you can also download the outcomes of other work related to building energy management including: a categorization framework and market characterization of building energy information systems (EIS), and a series of case studies with large facility owners to explore users’ experiences with EIS.

Related work, also posted at eis.lbl.gov, has developed a categorization framework and market characterization of building energy information (EIS) systems and explored users’ experience with EIS in a series of case studies with large facility owners.

For more information:

http://eis.lbl.gov

Ed Vine, a scientist in the Environmental Energy Technologies Division is the editor of a special issue of the journal Energy Efficiency focusing solely on the evaluation of energy efficiency (2012: volume 5 number 1). The papers published in the issue are a subset of those delivered at the International Energy Program Evaluation Conference held in Europe in 2010.

The issue’s introduction, by Vine and S. Thomas of the Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Environment, and Energy notes that “Europe is at a critical juncture in developing a professional evaluation community. As the European Commission designs and implements directives and the Member States, regions, local authorities, and energy companies all create their own policies and programs, it is important that the evaluation community in Europe participate in the design and implementation of energy efficiency programs and policies, as well as in their evaluation. Policymakers need to know what works and what does not work.”

The full set of papers from the conference are available here.

A study released today by researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) identifies steps that energy efficiency program managers can take to deliver significant savings on home energy bills to middle-income households.

“Middle-income households have been hit hard by the recent recession, and sagging home prices have undermined the traditional reliance of middle-income households on home equity for financing home improvements,” says Berkeley Lab’s Mark Zimring, a researcher in the Environmental Energy Technologies Division (EETD) and co-author on the report.  “It is really difficult to motivate them to invest in improving the efficiency of their homes, and to overcome the up-front cost barrier once they’re motivated.”

Middle-income households–those making about $32,500 to $72,500 per year–account for one-third of total U.S. residential energy use and figure prominently in meeting energy savings targets that now exist in most states, as well as reducing air emissions and managing demands on the grid.

Read the rest:

http://newscenter.lbl.gov/news-releases/2011/12/20/saving-on-energy-bills-meeting-families-in-the-middle/

More information:

http://middleincome.lbl.gov/

Download the study:

http://eetd.lbl.gov/EAP/EMP/reports/lbnl-5244e.pdf

Researchers estimate that those of us in developed countries spend 90 percent of our time indoors, which means that most of the time we are breathing air polluted by emissions from indoor sources. Providing more outdoor air ventilation can improve indoor air quality; however, energy is needed to heat, cool, humidify or dehumidify, and sometimes filter the ventilation air brought indoors from outdoors. Studies have shown that about 10 percent of the energy consumed in the U.S. commercial buildings is used to thermally condition ventilation air. To improve a building’s energy efficiency, we would like to reduce ventilation rates while maintaining good air quality—or better yet, to do so while improving indoor air quality.

Through their work at the Indoor Environment Department of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s Environmental Energy Technologies Division (EETD), William Fisk, Hugo Destaillats, and Meera Sidheswaran are devising solutions to this challenge. Recently, they have been evaluating two ways to reduce indoor air pollutants without increasing ventilation rates: by developing a synthetic catalyst to reduce indoor formaldehyde concentrations, and by evaluating the effectiveness of activated carbon fiber filters in reducing other volatile organic compound (VOC) concentrations.

Formaldehyde is a common indoor pollutant that the World Health Organization and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services lists as a human carcinogen. Formaldehyde concentrations in indoor air are routinely above the maximum recommended indoor level, so efforts to improve indoor air quality often target formaldehyde.

“Mean formaldehyde concentrations in a typical U.S. building are about 17 parts per billion,” says Destaillats, “although 20 to 50 parts per billion are fairly common. ” The California Environmental Protection Agency guideline for the maximum recommended long-term-average formaldehyde concentration is 9 parts per billion.

To reduce these formaldehyde concentrations, Fisk, Destaillats, and Sidheswaran developed a catalyst that could be applied to the filters routinely used to remove particles from airstreams. They formed the catalyst samples by co-precipitation of manganese-containing precursors, and cured them at different temperatures to compare their effectiveness. The synthesis resulted in a black powder containing agglomerates of particles smaller than 50 nanometers (nm) in diameter, giving the formaldehyde plenty of surface area with which to react. The research team used porosimetry and surface area analysis; X-ray diffractometry; SEM imaging analysis; and ICP-MS analysis to characterize the catalyst.
Read the rest: http://eetd.lbl.gov/news-archives/news-voc-air.html

For more information contact Allan Chen, a_chen@lbl.gov.

Technical contact: William Fisk, WJFisk@lbl.gov

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory is seeking participants for a study of air quality in California homes. The study is being conducted by scientists in the Environmental Energy Technologies Division of Berkeley Lab. This project is funded by the California Energy Commission and is focused on homes with natural gas appliances. Individuals who are selected to participate and complete the requirements of the study will receive $75 and free information about the air quality in their home.

The goal of this study is to collect information about indoor air quality in homes in California, and to better understand what factors affect indoor air quality. To achieve this goal, the research team plans to monitor indoor air quality parameters for one-week periods in homes in California, and to have the residents of these homes complete a survey about their household activities and appliance characteristics. They will be studying homes that have natural gas appliances.

For more information: http://healthyhomes.lbl.gov/

From the Heat Islands Group of the Environmental Energy Technologies Division of Berkeley Lab:

A recent Journal of Climate paper by Stanford’s Mark Jacobson and John Ten Hoeve (2011) on urban heat islands and cool roofs is a useful contribution to the literature. However, their results regarding white roofs are preliminary and uncertain. Along with our own work at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, other published papers have addressed the broader benefits of white roofs. In our view, these studies taken together raise important issues that need to be considered from a policy standpoint to fully understand the potential of more reflective (white or cool) surfaces.

Jacobson and Ten Hoeve note that reflecting light from white roofs may lead to a decrease in cloud cover, thereby increasing, not decreasing, the urban heat effect. But they also note that their findings might change if they used different models. This is an ongoing research area not only for their group, but others, and ours as well. The findings should not be considered settled.

We have found that white roofs do provide a low-cost solution that can help buildings reduce energy costs, in a wide variety of climates, as well as cool the atmosphere regionally and globally. We have also found disadvantages. The reflective roofs may cause unwanted glare, for example, and may modestly increase heating costs in winter. But answers to these issues are exactly the ones we’re working hard to find.

More information.

A technical response.

New materials are crucial to building a clean energy economy—for everything from batteries to photovoltaics to lighter weight vehicles—but today the development cycle is too slow: around 18 years from conception to commercialization. To speed up this process, a team of researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) teamed up to develop a new tool, called the Materials Project, which launches this month.

“Our vision is for this tool to become a dynamic ‘Google’ of material properties, which continually grows and changes as more users come on board to analyze the results, verify against experiments and increase their knowledge,” says Kristin Persson, a Berkeley Lab chemist and one of the founding scientists behind the Materials Project. “So many scientists can benefit from this type of screening. Considering the demand for innovative clean energy technology we needed most of these materials yesterday.”

Read the rest.

It’s a grand challenge: develop clean, sustainable technologies that deliver a low-carbon energy future, and through innovation, create jobs, new markets, and exports, and increase America’s energy security.

Researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have made it their mission to develop low-carbon and energy-efficient technologies such as advanced materials and information technology for buildings; next-generation biofuels; new battery, fuel cell, and thermoelectric energy-storage technologies; and carbon capture and sequestration technologies. This Lab-wide effort is called Carbon Cycle 2.0, bringing together teams of scientists from throughout Berkeley Lab to do the R&D for sustainable energy solutions, at the lab where modern team-based science was first developed and practiced in the 1930s, by founding Director Ernest O. Lawrence.

But what impact will these technologies—still in the laboratory, not yet in the marketplace—actually have? How much will they reduce energy, water and materials use throughout their life cycles, how much could they mitigate climate change, and what are their health and economic impacts?

Scientists in Berkeley Lab’s Environmental Energy Technologies Division (EETD), in cooperation with colleagues throughout the Lab, have formed a team to evaluate these impacts: the Carbon Cycle 2.0 Energy and Environmental Analysis Team (E2AT), led by EETD’s Eric Masanet.

“It’s a fairly new approach for the Lab,” says Masanet, “to use the analytic lenses we’ve developed here in EETD to analyze the costs, and energy, water, materials and climate change impacts of technologies that are still in the research and development phases. This effort is scientifically much more challenging than analyses of technologies that are already in the marketplace.”

“The ultimate goal of the work,” he adds, “is to provide guidance to scientists, funding agencies, and policymakers about which technology options are the most beneficial to pursue—which have the largest potential impact cost-effectively.”

Read the rest: http://eetd.lbl.gov/news-archives/news-carbon-cycle-finds.html

With companion article “A Closer Look at Carbon Sequestration”:

http://eetd.lbl.gov/news-archives/news-carbon-cycle.html

Current standards for U.S. offices require approximately 8 liters per second (L/s) of outdoor air ventilation per person. Providing twice as much ventilation would reduce sick building syndrome symptoms (SBS) and absences, improve work performance, and provide billions of dollars in annual economic benefits in the U.S., according to a recent study from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab).
Tall Building

A second study found that four remedial measures in U.S. offices—increasing low ventilation rates, improving temperature controls so that offices don’t get too hot in winter, performing dampness and mold remediation, and adding economizers—would reduce adverse health effects and health care costs, decrease absence rates, improve thermal comfort, and improve work performance. The projected societal economic benefits of non-overlapping combinations of these remedial measures range from $17 billion to $26 billion per year.

These are among the conclusions of scientists at Berkeley Lab’s Environmental Energy Technologies Division reporting the results of studies in two recently published journal articles.

Read the rest: http://eetd.lbl.gov/news-archives/news-ventilation.html

Nearly all cars sold in California have air conditioners. Cars painted with reflective coatings stay cooler in the sun and are easier to air condition to a comfortable temperature, according to a recent study by researchers in Berkeley Lab’s Environmental Energy Technologies Division.

“Solar reflective paints can decrease the ‘soak’ temperature of the air in a car that has been parked in the sun. This could improve the vehicle’s fuel economy by letting the manufacturer install a smaller air conditioner that draws less power from the engine,” says Ronnen Levinson, scientist in the Heat Island Group, and lead author of the study. The research was published in Applied Energy.

White, silver, and other light colors are coolest, reflecting about 60% of sunlight. However, dark “cool colors” that reflect primarily in the invisible “near infrared” part of the solar spectrum can also stay cooler than traditional dark colors.

Read the rest: http://eetd.lbl.gov/news-archives/news-cool-cars.html