EETD Communications

A new study on the installed costs of solar photovoltaic (PV) power systems in the U.S. shows that the average cost of these systems declined significantly from 1998 to 2007, but remained relatively flat during the last two years of this period.

Researchers at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) who conducted the study say that the overall decline in the installed cost of solar PV systems is mostly the result of decreases in nonmodule costs, such as the cost of labor, marketing, overhead, inverters, and the balance of systems.

Read the rest of this release at:

http://newscenter.lbl.gov/press-releases/2009/02/19/solar-system-cost-report/

Download the report here:

http://eetd.lbl.gov/ea/emp/reports/lbnl-1516e.pdf

Berkeley, CA—Research conducted at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory suggests that operating buildings more energy efficiently could have benefits for the health of occupants and, surprisingly, also for their comfort.

The researchers, Mark Mendell and Anna Mirer of Berkeley Lab’s Environmental Energy Technologies Division, analyzed data collected from 95 air-conditioned office buildings across the U.S. The data had been gathered by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in a study called BASE (Building Assessment Survey and Evaluation). The study produced data about indoor environmental conditions and the health of occupants in a representative set of U.S. office buildings.

Read the rest here at http://newscenter.lbl.gov/press-releases/2009/02/17/cooling-heating-health/

In the current issue of Environmental Science and Technology, EETD’s Evan Mills has a cover story, “Sustainable Scientists,” examining how scientists might practice energy efficiency in research facilities to help reduce their own greenhouse gas emissions, as well as reduce the amount of research money spent on  energy costs. He notes that scientific research in the U.S. has a yearly energy bill of about $10 billion, and results in 80 million tons of greenhouse gas emissions.

http://pubs.acs.org/toc/esthag/current

Evan Mills and Jon Koomey, two scientists  in the Environmental Energy Technologies Division of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, have posted a letter responding to an article that was published in the London Sunday Times on January 11 about the environmental impact of Internet searchers. Mills was quoted in this article in a way that he feels creates a misleading impression of the carbon intensity (a measure of greenhouse gas emissions as a function of energy use) of the Internet.

Because their letter of correction was published by the Times in a substantially edited, truncated form, they have posted the full text on a web page (below).

http://eetd.lbl.gov/emills/commentaries/tempest.html

A newly re-launched website describes the efforts of scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and UC Berkeley to develop inexpensive, reliable technologies for removing arsenic contamination from drinking water. Because of naturally occurring arsenic in the well water of a number of developing nations, finding low-cost technology is crucial.

http://arsenic.lbl.gov/

A new study by researchers in the Environmental Energy Technologies Division analyzes the costs of building transmission lines for wind energy. Andrew Mills and Ryan Wiser, and consultant Kevin Porter found, by analyzing 40 transmission studies for new power projects, that for the majority of projects, the cost of building new transmission lines to distribute wind power to the grid was about 25 percent of the current $2,000 per kW cost of building a wind project.

Download the study here:
http://eetd.lbl.gov/ea/ems/reports/lbnl-1471e.pdf