EETD Communications

Smart grid software and hardware technology developed by the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) helped Northern California power utility Pacific Gas and Electric Company and several of its commercial and industrial customers demonstrate that they can reduce power usage automatically and quickly—in less than 10 minutes—in support of grid reliability. This approach is sometimes called Fast-DR (fast demand response).

http://newscenter.lbl.gov/feature-stories/2009/08/19/smart-grid-success/

We have just posted a new web page about jobs in energy efficiency, with links to some job listings. Please look it over, and send us your suggestions for additional links. Email the webmaster of that page. As more employers become aware of energy efficiency as a source of job creation, we hope to offer more links with listings, as well as reports outlining the staffing needs of energy-efficiency related industries.

http://eetd.lbl.gov/einfo-jobs.html

Check out Jim Gunshinan’s blog entries from the National Weatherization Training Conference. They are talking about training fro green jobs, among other things. Jim is the Managing Editor of Home Energy magazine.

www.kqed.org/quest/blog/2009/07/24/weatherization-gets-down-to-business

EETD scientist Evan Mills has finished a new report outlining the benefits of commissioning new and retrofit commercial buildings—potential for saving a median of 13% of the energy use of new buildings and 16% in building retrofits, based on a study of 643 buildings representing 99 million square feet. Commissioning is the process of testing and fine-tuning building systems in a new or retrofit building before it is occupied to make sure that they are working up to specification. Good commissioning saves energy and reduces energy bills. The word was originally used in connection with applying this process to naval ships when they were finished, but before they went into service.

Download the report here:

http://cx.lbl.gov/2009-assessment.html

Here’s a nice story about a young inventor who was inspired by EETD’s Ashok Gadgil to invent technology to help developing nations.

http://newscenter.lbl.gov/feature-stories/2009/07/20/young-inventor/

I missed this when it happened a few months ago, but the Indoor Air Quality Scientific Findings Resources Bank added substantial new material in the section on indoor dampness, biological contaminants and healt:

http://eetd.lbl.gov/ied/sfrb/dampness-summary.html

The website is a knowledge base of peer-reviewed scientific material on indoor air quality, much of it written to understood  broadly by those without special training in the field.

http://eetd.lbl.gov/ied/sfrb/sfrb.html

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/

At a news conference in Washington yesterday, Energy Secretary Chu announced support for transforming the nation’s electricity grid into a smart grid. The announcement included funding for smart grid development and steps to agree on a set of standards to govern the smart grid. One of these standards is OpenADR, which addresses automated demand response, and which was developed by researchers here at the Environmental Energy Technologies Division of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. For more information on yesterday’s event, see the DOE press release here:

http://www.energy.gov/news2009/7408.htm

The OpenADR press release:

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

EETD has just released a new website that provides guidance on metrics and benchmarks that can be used to identify potential efficiency opportunities in laboratories, data centers and cleanrooms.

If you manage one of these types of facilities, have a look at this site, and see how well yours compares to best practice.

http://hightech.lbl.gov/benchmarking-guides/

OpenADR has made the initial list of the National Institute of Standards and Technolog’s (NIST) “Recognized Standards for Inclusion In the Smart Grid Interoperability Standards Framework, Release 1.0.” OPenADR is one of only 16 standards currently in Release 1.0.

A great accomplishment for the Demand Response Research Center and the California Energy Commission’s Public Interest Energy Research program.

See
http://www.nist.gov/smartgrid/standards.html

On OpenADR:

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

An excellent redesigned website describing EETD’s project to develop energy-efficient lighting for Asia, Africa and the rest of the developing world has debuted:

http://light.lbl.gov/

The California Clean Tech Open holds a symposium on energy efficiency on May 19 at the PG&E headquarters in San Francisco. A speaker from the Environmental Energy Technologies Division  willo be one of the panelists. More information here:

http://www.cleantechopen.com/app.cgi/events/view/105

Contact: Allan Chen (510) 486-4210
Technical Contact: Mary Ann Piette (510) 486-6286

Berkeley Lab Researchers Announce OpenADR Specification to Ease Saving Power in Buildings Through Demand Response

New specification will advance development of “Smart Grid”

Berkeley, CA—A new data model developed by researchers at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and their colleagues at other universities  and in the private sector will help facilities and buildings save power through automated demand response technology, and advance the development of the Smart Grid.

The researchers who developed Open ADR (Open Automated Demand Response) are part of the Demand Response Research Center  (DRRC), a center funded by the California Energy Commission’s Public Interest Energy Research Program. The DRRC’s goal is to develop technologies to make it possible for buildings and facilities to adopt demand response as a way of saving peak power use, and reducing stress on the electric grid during times of high energy demand.

“The purpose of this specification is to help building and facilities managers implement automated demand response in their facilities, as well as assist electric utilities to help their commercial and industrial customers participate in power pricing programs that incorporate automated demand response…

“OpenADR also helps manufacturers of building automation equipment design products for Smart Grid implementation, and power aggregators incorporate demand response into their work. OpenADR builds on six years of research in California to develop autoDR technology and demonstrate it in buildings with our utility and commercial  partners,” said Mary Ann Piette, the Deputy Head of the Building Technologies Department, and Research Director of the Demand Response Research Center.

Read more about it here:

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

The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s Environmental Energy Technologies Division is hiring scientists, research associates, program managers, and post-doctoral fellows to help conduct research in energy-efficient building technologies and policies; the smart electrical grid, energy markets and policy; advanced battery development; and other advanced materials such as window coatings and organic LEDs.

Go to http://cjo.lbl.gov/

Hit the link to “Job search.”

Under Career Path, highlight “All.” Under Division, highlight “Environmental Energy Tech.” Click “Search Jobs.”

Apply!

Aircraft Measured Bay Area, Sacramento Valley Greenhouse Gas Emissions

R&D Collaboration of Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, NOAA, UC Davis

Scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the University of California recently measured greenhouse gases over California using aircraft to improve estimates of the state’s GHG emissions. The Airborne Greenhouse Gas Emissions Survey (AGES) project is developing methods that are expected to prove important for verifying emissions reductions mandated by California’s assembly bill AB 32.

The flights used a Cessna 210 aircraft equipped with instruments to measure multiple GHG (e.g., CO2, CH4, N2O) species above the San Francisco Bay and Sacramento Valley areas.

The Berkeley Lab effort, led by Marc Fischer of the Lab’s Environmental Energy Technologies Division, is a collaboration with Colm Sweeney, at NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder, Professor Ian Faloona at UC Davis, and Suman Surapali and Tom Sherwood of Kalscott Engineering in Lawrence, Kansas. The project is partially supported by DOE’s Office of Biological and Environmental Research.

The AGES project builds on tall-tower GHG measurements that are being made by the California Greenhouse Gas Emissions (CALGEM) Project, another Berkeley Lab-NOAA collaboration partially supported by the California Energy Commission’s Public Interest Energy Research Program.

In this project, combining the aircraft sampling and tall-tower measurements from CALGEM , Fischer’s team will refine estimates of GHG emissions such as CO2, CH4, and N2O from Central California energy consumption and agricultural activities.

Editors: If you are interested in talking to Marc Fischer about his research, please set up a time to call or visit by emailing him at MLFischer@lbl.gov

A feature story about CALGEM

http://www.lbl.gov/Science-Articleas/Archive/sabl/2007/Apr/02-CALGEM.html

CALGEM:
http://eetd.lbl.gov/env/mlf/CALGEM/

NOAA’s Earth System Research Laboratory
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/

Scaling Up: From Green Buildings to Green Cities in the U.S. and China

Mark Levine, China Energy Group Leader and former Environmental Energy Technologies Division Director to speak

Buildings consume well over 30 percent of all primary energy in the world, more than either transportation or industry. By building green, we can reduce energy consumption in this key sector by 30 to 50 percent and cut greenhouse gas emissions by similar margins. It is also one of the cheapest ways to do so: green building adds only one to five percent to construction costs, which are recovered through reduced energy demand in a few years or less.

This one-day conference is the first to bring together leading green design specialists from the fields of research, technology, architecture, business, and policy from the U.S. and China to build  a dialogue and collaboration. The U.S. and China are rapidly becoming the global centers for green design promotion, development, and investment, and many other Asian countries are beginning to follow suit.

Mark Levine, leader of EETD’s China Energy Group, will be a speaker at this conference.

Friday, May 1, 2009
8:30 am Registration/Breakfast
9:00 am-5:00 pm Program
PG&E Auditorium
77 Beale St. (between Market and Mission)
San Francisco

More information and conference registration:
http://asiasociety.org/greencities/