EETD Communications

Two companies nominated by the Demand Response Research Center’s Rish Ghatikar received a Buildy Award at the recent Connectivity Week meeting in San Jose. Ghatikar’s nomination of Powerit Solutions was based in the company’s successful integration of the  OpenADR communication infrastructure and enabling automated demand response (Auto-DR) at Amy’s Kitchen, a specialty food manufacturer.

OpenADR was developed  by the Demand Response Research Center, with funding from the California Energy Commission’s Public Interest Energy Research Program, to help ease the path toward automated demand response for facilities and companies.  The DRRC is based at the Environmental Energy Technologies Division of the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab).

Powerit Solutions developed an OpenADR-compliant web services client to connect and respond to price and reliability signals initiated by Pacific Gas & Electric’s Auto-DR program. When a demand response event is called by PG&E for the next day, Powerit Solution’s Web service client, polling the PG&E Demand Response Automation Server, receives DR event information and triggers pre-programmed operating modes to automatically reduce peak load for Amy’s Kitchen.

http://www.connectivityweek.com/2009/#session_903

http://www.poweritsolutions.com/

For more information on OpenADR, see:

http://newscenter.lbl.gov/press-releases/2009/04/27/openadr-specification/

Berkeley, CA—”Microsoft Corporation is announcing today the launch of its  web-based home energy management service, Hohm, which uses the energy models in the Home Energy Saver™  (http://hes.lbl.gov), developed by U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Craig Mundie, Microsoft’s Chief Strategist made the announcement at the Edison Electric Institute’s annual convention in San Francisco. Hohm™ will provide homeowners with a web-based energy dashboard to help them manage their home’s energy use more effectively.

“Microsoft’s licensing of the Home Energy Saver will bring important capabilities of our home energy-efficiency software technology to an even broader user base than it currently has,” said Evan Mills, a scientist in the Environmental Energy Technologies Division. “This is an example of the power of publicly financed energy research being harnessed by the private sector to develop entirely new applications and markets,” added Rich Brown, Deputy Leader of EETD’s Technology Evaluation, Markets, and Assessments Group, and energy analysis lead for the Home Energy Saver. Both Mills and Brown helped develop the Home Energy Saver.

The Home Energy Saver calculator is designed to help consumers identify the best ways to save energy in their homes, and find the resources to make the savings happen. The Home Energy Saver calculator was the first Internet-based tool for calculating energy use in residential buildings. About 1,000,000 people visit the HES site each year, more than 90 percent of whom are homeowners and renters. The Home Energy Saver calculator quickly computes a home’s energy use on-line based on methods developed at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Users can estimate how much energy and money can be saved and how much emissions can be reduced by implementing energy-efficiency improvements.

Berkeley Lab is a U.S. Department of Energy national laboratory located in Berkeley, California. It conducts unclassified scientific research and is managed by the University of California. Visit our website at http://www.lbl.gov.

For more information about Microsoft’s Hohm, go to:

http://mshohm.orcsweb.com/

Find the Home Energy Saver at:

http://hes.lbl.gov

Berkeley, CA—Two researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), Evan Mills and Michael Wehner, contributed to the analysis of the effects of climate change on all regions of the United States, described in a major report released today by the multi-agency U.S. Global Change Research Program.

For the southwest region of the United States, which includes California, the report forecasts a hotter, drier climate with significant effects on the environment, agriculture and health.

Read the rest at:

http://newscenter.lbl.gov/press-releases/2009/06/16/climate-change-impacts/

Another article of mine has just appeared on the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory news web pages. It deals with the 30 years’ work of Rick Russo’s group at EETD to study the physics of laser ablation, and their successful effort to apply laser ablation in a  clean and  fast method of conducting chemical analysis (in the lab and the field). Laser ablation for laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS), and another type of spectroscopy called ICP, reduces the generation of chemical wastes to almost zero, and is much more energy-efficient. It is also fast, and has been adapted to lightweight field technologies for detecting hazardous wastes, and detecting explosives from a distance—a real  boon to, for example, troops in the field steering a path around mines and car bombs, or bomb detection squads trying to determine if a suspicious object contains an explosive. Read more about it here:

http://newscenter.lbl.gov/feature-stories/2009/06/04/green-chemistry/

Just published at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory website, my article describing some preliminary research on developing technologies for ultra-low energy (”net-zero energy”) commercial buildings.

“Producing new commercial buildings that use 80 percent less energy than today’s average building is a new target in the fight against global climate change. If such a building’s remaining energy consumption is supplied by clean, carbon-neutral renewable energy, it would be responsible for little or no greenhouse gas emissions…”

Read the rest here:

http://newscenter.lbl.gov/feature-stories/2009/06/02/working-toward-the-very-low-energy-consumption-building-of-the-future/