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From single-family and multifamily housing to commercial buildings and university campuses, groups of buildings offer untapped potential to boost energy efficiency and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Through its Connected Communities program, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) recently launched nine demonstration projects across the country to explore this potential. DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley... Read more

By 2033, more than 1 billion laptops, cellphones, and other electronic devices could be entering the U.S. waste stream each year. That’s according to a new study in Nature Sustainability that projects a dramatic increase in the amount and complexity of U.S. waste electronics in the decade ahead. If not properly recycled, this influx represents a growing cause for environmental concern as it... Read more

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) research scientist Hanna Breunig was named co-director of the Hydrogen Materials Advanced Research Consortium (HyMARC). Breunig serves as Deputy-Head of the Sustainable Energy and Environmental Systems Department within the Energy Analysis and Environmental Impacts (EAEI) Division of Berkeley Lab. HyMARC was formed to address the scientific gaps... Read more

Diesel-fueled freight trucks play an outsized role in producing India’s total greenhouse gas and air pollution emissions. While the country has promoted policies to transition to electric vehicles for public transportation buses and cars, batteries that can power such large trucks have been too heavy and expensive to make their electrification possible. A new study from the Department of... Read more

This article was adapted from a release developed by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and was initially published at the Berkeley Lab News Center. Stor4Build is a new consortium on energy storage for buildings that will accelerate the growth, optimization, and deployment of storage technologies. The consortium will be co-led by the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Lawrence Berkeley... Read more

A recent segment on Al Jazeera English featured field research on arsenic removal initiated at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab). Led by Ashok Gadgil, a physicist and senior faculty scientist at Berkeley Lab’s Energy Technologies Area, scientists and engineers are testing a filtration system in rural California that can remove dangerous levels of arsenic from groundwater at... Read more

Chemical engineer Peng Peng is helping develop a 100% renewable energy grid by investigating new materials for storing hydrogen gas, which can be used like a battery to stash power generated from solar and wind farms. Watch the video to learn how Peng uses computer models to study how lab-scale material prototypes would perform at the industrial scale, and how much they would cost – accelerating... Read more

Berkeley Lab researchers reviewed evidence on using indoor engineering controls to reduce transmission risk Watch the related video on our youtube channel: youtu.be/fgNb6B9NZ2w Along with vaccines, masks, and testing, indoor air hygiene and building engineering controls will be key to slowing the spread of airborne, highly infectious variants of COVID-19. In a recent review in the journal Indoor... Read more

By the middle of this century, temperatures in some California cities are expected to be in the triple digits for a third of the year. That’s dangerously hot. Heat already kills more people each year than any other weather-related disaster, including hurricanes, floods, or winter storms, and as the mercury rises the toll is expected to keep climbing. Researchers and scientists from across the... Read more

Multiple innovative technologies developed in the Energy Technologies Area of the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have been honored with a 2022 R&D 100 Award. The award, presented by R&D Magazine and selected by an independent panel of judges, recognizes the year’s 100 most innovative and disruptive technology products from... Read more

Wind energy continues to see strong growth, solid performance, and attractive prices in the U.S., according to a report released by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and prepared by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab). With levelized costs of just over $30 per megawatt-hour (MWh) for newly built projects, the cost of wind is well below its grid-system, health, and climate... Read more

Some smells seem to seep into everything they touch. Tobacco smoke is one of the worst offenders. Thirdhand smoke refers to residual nicotine and other hazardous chemicals that contaminate the indoor environment after smoking. Think of the lingering smell you’ve probably encountered when handling the clothes of a person who smokes a pack a day, or when checking into a tidy but cigarette-friendly... Read more

Scientists have designed a new material system to overcome one of the biggest challenges in recycling consumer products: mixed-plastic recycling. Their achievement will help enable a much broader range of fully recyclable plastic products and brings into reach an efficient circular economy for durable goods like automobiles. We generate staggering quantities of plastic and plastic-containing... Read more

Berkeley Lab has initiated a national public-private partnership to update and upgrade the Interruption Cost Estimate (ICE) Calculator—a publicly-available, online tool—which estimates the economic consequences of power interruptions. Information on the costs that customers experience when the lights go out is an important consideration for the planning and prioritization of improvements to... Read more

Converting petroleum into fuels involves crude chemistry first invented by humans in the 1800s. Meanwhile, bacteria have been producing carbon-based energy molecules for billions of years. Which do you think is better at the job? Well aware of the advantages biology has to offer, a group of biofuel experts led by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) took inspiration from an... Read more

Two researchers recently participated in a panel discussion on Algorithms and Data for Equity at the Women in Data Science Conference at Stanford University, showcasing the importance of diversity in this critical research area. Jessica Granderson, then serving as Director for Building Technology on the White House Council on Environmental Quality, and Ling Jin joined with University of California... Read more

A new cohort of 11 scientists and engineers will join the prestigious two-year fellowship program at Cyclotron Road based at the Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab). Selected from a pool of more than 200 applicants, the 2022 Cohort fellows will work with Berkeley Lab scientists and facilities to translate innovative research into market-ready... Read more

The United States has set an ambitious goal to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by at least 50% by 2030. Are we on track to succeed? A new study by a team of scientists and policy analysts from across the nation suggests that there are multiple pathways to achieve this goal – but big commitments will need to be made, immediately. “This study should give policy makers and other energy... Read more

Experts from the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) will play leading managerial and technical roles in the recently established Net Zero World Action Center to bolster DOE’s Net Zero World Initiative (NZWI). The NZW Action Center brings together 10 DOE national laboratories, nine U.S. government agencies, and philanthropy organizations to promote net... Read more

With the rise in renewable energy, as well as increasing uncertainty associated with outages due to power surges and extreme weather events, energy storage plays a key role in ensuring reliable power supply to critical infrastructure such as healthcare facilities, data centers, and telecommunications. Hydrogen shows promise as an energy storage solution, and researchers are developing materials... Read more

Public schools spend roughly $8 billion a year on energy bills — the second largest expense after teacher salaries. Promoting energy efficiency can be a good way to save money for school districts and increase the comfort and health of teachers and students, all while reducing pollution. At a briefing in April 2022, the White House gave a shout out to a new tool that Berkeley Lab has developed... Read more

One of the most important electric power system trends of the 2010s was the rapid deployment of wind turbines and photovoltaic arrays, but early data suggests a twist for the 2020s may be the rapid deployment of ‘hybrid’ generation resources. Hybrid power plants typically combine solar or wind (or other energy sources) with co-located storage. Just as cost declines drove last decade’s wind... Read more

The need for negative emissions technologies to address our climate crisis has become increasingly clear. At the rate that our planet is emitting carbon dioxide – adding about 50 gigatons every year – we will have to remove carbon dioxide at the gigaton scale by 2050 in order to achieve “net zero” emissions. The U.S. Department of Energy has recognized the urgency of carbon dioxide removal... Read more

On the first Earth Day in 1970, researcher Steve Greenberg was one of 20 million Americans, then 10% of the population, inspired to take time to observe the fragility of the planet and the need to protect it. Over 50 years later, an estimated one billion people around the world—one in eight—are actively participating. In the early '70s, visionaries like Art Rosenfeld applied science and... Read more

Power plants and other industrial facilities often spew carbon dioxide into the atmosphere like a leaky faucet. As governments around the world are striving to reduce and even eliminate their greenhouse gas emissions and reach “net zero” emissions by mid-century, they’re looking for technologies to help. What if we could somehow suck up all that carbon dioxide, like a giant vacuum cleaner? A... Read more