EETD Communications

EET Division Director Arun Majumdar recently testified before the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources. His  testimony outlines a potential national strategy for making buildings more energy-efficient and moving new buildings toward zero-net energy use. His strategy addresses needs in science and technology, policy and finance, technology deployment and market transformation, and workforce development

Download the PDF here.

http://eetd.lbl.gov/news-archives/pubs/majumdar-testimony-022609.pdf

Click on the first link below and you’ll go to a University of California news page reporting on the events of UC Day in California’s state capitol. Of the several videos posted there, the link to “Can UC be a test bed for measuring energy consumption in buildings?” shows a brief clip of Environmental Energy Technologies Division Arun Majumdar discussing this possibility.

The second link below is a summary of some of the work on energy-efficient buildings technology around the University of California system, including our work on energy-efficient windows

http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/article/19564

Smart Buildings: UC Improves Energy Efficiency

http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/youruniversity/smartbldgs.html

Last month, the San Francisco Chronicle published a brief interview with Bill Joy, founder of Sun Microsystems, a major author of UNIX, and thinker about the future of technology (”Joy discusses techie role in limiting pollution).” He made one comment that we would like to correct.

Referring to the the scientific community in the Bay area, he is quoted as saying “Innovations can also be done with batteries and engines – that’s chemistry – and thermodynamics, but we don’t have an intellectual community behind those. There are skills that don’t exist in the valley…”

In fact, this is not true. At Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, teams of chemists, physicists and materials scientists operate one of the pre-eminent research programs in the world to develop advanced lithium-ion batteries. This research program, funded by the Department of Energy’s BATT program (Batteries for Advanced Transportation Technologies) could lead to useful and affordable batteries to power plug-in-hybrid cars and eventually all-electric vehicles.

Development of a battery to power a plug-in hybrid car forty miles could free America from our reliance on imported oil and eliminate the carbon dioxide that contributes to global climate change– as long as the electricity to charge the batteries is made on a green grid (solar, wind, renewable energy sources).

We invite Bill Joy (and the Chronicle) to visit Berkeley Lab at any time to find out more about our advanced battery research, as well as all the other science–from biosystems and health to high performance supercomputing – that make the Lab a center for problem-solving and innovation.
Read the article in the Chronicle here:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/02/13/BUBA15SUQT.DTL&hw=bill+joy&sn=002&sc=922

Read some articles about the lithium ion battery R&D  here:

Batteries of the Future 1

http://www.lbl.gov/Science-Articles/Archive/sabl/2007/Feb/future-batteries-I.html

Batteries of the Future 2

http://www.lbl.gov/Science-Articles/Archive/sabl/2007/Feb/future-batteries-II.html

The BATT Fab Lab

http://www.lbl.gov/Science-Articles/Archive/sabl/2007/Jul/BATT.html

The Batteries for Advanced Transportation Technologies program website

http://batt.lbl.gov/