Vol. 6 | Issue 1 | December 2022 | | |
Working Together
One of the things that I prize the most about being a part of the Building Technology and Urban Systems (BTUS) Division is working alongside the many amazingly talented and motivated colleagues. The work that we do together addresses some of the most pressing problems of our time and truly speaks to the Lab's mission of bringing science solutions to the world.
In this issue of our newsletter, you can read about BTUS researchers who are being recognized for a lifetime of impact and for outstanding publication records. Also featured are several exciting initiatives that our colleagues lead or participate in, such as the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Connected Communities Initiative, the Stor4Build energy storage consortium, or DOE’s Efficient and Healthy Schools Campaign.
As the end of the year approaches, I want to wish you a happy and peaceful holiday and look forward to seeing you in the New Year.
— Luís Fernandes, Department Head, Building Technologies, BTUS Division
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Ohio State hosts DOE Connected Communities Kickoff
DOE officials including Acting Assistant Secretary Alejandro Moreno recently spent a day on the Ohio State University campus to kick off the Connected Communities initiative, where Berkeley Lab serves as the national coordinator with a team led by FLEXLAB® Executive Director Cindy Regnier. They were joined by leaders of Connected Communities project awardees, including an Ohio State team of researchers.
In October 2021, DOE announced $61 million for 10 pilot projects that will conceive, optimize, build, and refine “connected communities,” in which buildings and distributed energy resources—such as flexible building loads, photovoltaic solar panels, electric vehicle charging stations, and storage—are controlled in coordination with the electrical grid. This leads to optimized energy consumption within the community, supporting clean energy supplied by the power grid and providing a model for reducing the building sector’s contribution to the climate crisis. As one of 10 selected projects, Ohio State received a $4.9 million DOE grant to be used over the next five years.
Additional information can be found here. Learn about Connected Communities here.
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Berkeley Lab Hosts Administrator Carnahan from the General Service Administration (GSA)
In November of this year, Berkeley Lab hosted a visit from GSA Administrator Robin Carnahan. The visit included a presentation outlining the innovative work being done at Berkeley Lab and a tour of the FLEXLAB®. There was a discussion about future collaborations with GSA to help with low-carbon materials, emerging technologies, and high-performance green buildings.
Learn more about the GSA here.
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Buildings Consortium Leveraging Benefits of Thermal and Electrochemical Energy Storage for All Americans
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 DOE’s Berkeley Lab, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
Cost-effective energy storage is necessary for the large-scale deployment of renewable electricity, electrification, and decarbonization—and essential for meeting clean energy goals. Currently, as much as 50% of electricity consumption in buildings in the United States goes toward meeting thermal loads. Thermal energy storage solutions show promise as a cost-effective energy storage alternative.
Read More:
newscenter.lbl.gov/2022/11/15/national-laboratories-launch-buildings-consortium
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DOE Announces Open Applications for Second Year of Efficient and Healthy Schools Campaign
Applications are now open to work with DOE on the Efficient and Healthy Schools Campaign. This initiative works to improve energy performance, reduce carbon emissions, and promote a healthy learning environment in K-12 schools—especially those serving low-income student populations and in rural areas.
Through this interagency effort, DOE, the U.S. Department of Education, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency recognize exemplary solutions and activities that enhance energy efficiency and indoor environmental quality (indoor air quality, lighting, thermal comfort, and/or acoustics), reduce emissions, and improve resilience in their buildings. To date, 75 districts across more than 30 states have joined or are prepared to join, representing over 4 million students in 5,359 individual schools.
Learn more about getting involved here:
efficienthealthyschools.lbl.gov
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Register Now for Best Center's Annual Institute
Registration is now open for the Building Efficiency for a Sustainable Tomorrow (BEST) Center's 2023 Annual Institute, a free, virtual event slated for January 4–6, 2023. This year's theme is "Advancing Building Decarbonization: Policies, Technologies, and Workforce Education." Presentations and roundtable discussions will focus on educating technicians and developing strategies for reducing building operation carbon footprint while maintaining occupant comfort and health.
Learn more and register here:
best2023institute.vfairs
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Building Performance Database
The Energy Department’s Building Performance Database (BPD), the nation’s largest dataset of energy-related building characteristics, has expanded to include data from over 950,000 commercial and residential buildings. Through an average of 150 user sessions per week, BPD users are accessing data that has been cleansed and anonymized from across a variety of real estate sectors and regions for use in comparative analyses, as well as tracking of energy trends. Recently added features and capabilities have broadened the tool’s scope, enabling users to filter specific data, download analysis results and benchmarking charts, and insert markers in charts to identify their buildings.
Read more at:
energy.gov/eere/buildings/articles/building-performance-database-has-grown-nearly-1-million-buildings
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American Modelica Conference 2022
Senior Scientist Michael Wetter helped organize and co-chair the Scientific Program of the 2022 American Modelica Conference. The event featured a keynote from Scott Bortoff, Mistubishi Electric Research Laboratories, who showed how model-based design accelerates and de-risks product development of variable refrigerant flow systems, and from Dirk Zimmer of the German Aerospace Center, who presented novel methods that are applicable for heat pump modeling.
View the proceedings at: 2022.american.conference.modelica.org/documents/NA_Modelica_2022_Proceedings
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Berkeley Lab Scientists Provide Training to Indonesian Scholars to Scale Up High-Performance Building Technologies and Standards
Two researchers from Universitas Pendidikan Indonesia visited Berkeley Lab to learn about state-of-the-art infrastructure to aid the development of a testing and certification program for building components in Indonesia. The new testing lab in Indonesia aims to support the adoption of building energy codes and standards to facilitate the widespread implementation of high-performance buildings in the archipelago. During their two-week visit in fall 2022, the researchers engaged with representatives from the Net Zero World Initiative and U.S. DOE national laboratory researchers on topics including building envelope technology testing, radiative measurement, and ratings and standards.
Berkeley Lab staff contributing to the effort included Charlie Curcija (host), Ronnen Levinson, Sharon Chen, Hugo Destaillats, Virginie Letschert, and Wei Feng. For more information about the Net Zero World Initiative, visit the website and fact sheet.
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Director’s Award: Lifetime Achievement
The Director’s Awards program recognizes the significant achievements of Berkeley Lab employees. Each year, these awards are given for accomplishments, leadership, collaboration, multi-disciplinary science, cross-divisional projects, and commitment to excellence in support of the Lab’s mission and strategic goals.
This year, Mary Ann Piette, Interim Associate Lab Director, received the Lifetime Achievement award. This award recognizes a lifetime of innovative and inspiring achievements in energy-efficient and grid-interactive buildings research, including transformational real-world solutions to decarbonize the built environment, done with exceptional dedication to Berkeley Lab, the state, the nation, and the world.
Read more: recognition.lbl.gov/2022-laureates
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Societal Impact Award for DreamWarmer Infant Warmer
The Berkeley Lab Infant Warmer team of Ashok Gadgil, Howdy Goudey, Vi Rapp and Jonathan Slack (pictured, left to right) was awarded the 2022 Berkeley Lab Director's Societal Impact Award.
The team designed the “DreamWarmer,” an innovative, non-electric infant warmer that uniquely addresses the challenges of resource-limited settings and has been proven to reduce ’all-cause’ infant mortality by a factor of three.
Read more about the technology here.
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Lab Researchers on 'Highly Cited' List
Berkeley Lab Senior Scientist Tianzhen Hong has been recognized for highly cited publications by Clarivate Analytics. A highly cited paper would be in the top 1% for citations per field within a publication year. Go to the site and type “Lawrence Berkeley Lab” in the form to read a list of the researchers.
Search the database here.
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Release of Net Zero World Energy Decarbonization Pathways Report for Five Countries at COP27 by Secretary of Energy | |
Against the backdrop of a deepening climate crisis, world leaders and their delegates gathered in Egypt in November for talks focused on cutting greenhouse gas emissions and helping nations cope with the consequence of a rapidly warming planet. Nearly 200 countries participated in the United Nations’ climate change conference, known as COP27 (short for the 27th Conference of the Parties). Senior Scientist Nan Zhou represented Berkeley Lab at this conference.
Included on the agenda was the release of the Net Zero World (NZW) Energy Decarbonization Pathways Report for five countries. In a joint effort across DOE National Labs, Berkeley Lab researchers completed this first major Net Zero World Initiative product.
Berkeley Lab’s modeling and analysis, conducted by Virginie Letschert, Nina Khanna, Wei Feng, Hongyou Lu, Jing Ke, Stephane de la Rue du Can, Juan Pablo Carvallo, and Nan Zhou highlights the essential role of energy efficiency and fuel switching to electricity and hydrogen in order to meet Indonesia and Chile's decarbonization goals. Chile's government commended the work of our researchers and plans to integrate the new insights in their future modeling and policy planning.
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AIVC Technical Note 70: 40 Years to Build Tight and Ventilate Right: From Infiltration to Smart Ventilation | |
Members of the Berkeley Lab residential team contributed to a report summarizing 40 years of the International Energy Agency's Annex 5 (the Air Infiltration and Ventilation Center). The LBNL team's main contributions were focused on methods of measuring air exchange and modeling ventilation and infiltration. Read the report linked below.
aivc.org/resource/tn-70-40-years-build-tight-and-ventilate-right-infiltration-smart-ventilation
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Other Recent Publications
Liu, J., Yin, R., Yu, L,, Piete, MA., Pritoni, M., Casillas, A., Xie, J., Hong, T., et al. (2022) “Defining and applying an electricity demand flexibility benchmarking metrics framework for grid-interactive efficient commercial buildings,” Advances in Applied Energy, 8, p. 100107. DOI
buildings.lbl.gov/publications/defining-and-applying-electricity
Gautier, A., Wetter, M. and Sulzer, M. (2022) “Resilient cooling through Geothermal District Energy System,” Applied Energy, 325, p. 119880. DOI
buildings.lbl.gov/publications/resilient-cooling-through-geothermal
Langevin, J, Sartre-Meloy, A. Satchwell, A., et al. (2022) “The role of buildings in U.S. energy system decarbonization by mid-century.” DOI
buildings.lbl.gov/publications/role-buildings-us-energy-system
Zanetti, E. et al. (2022) “Performance comparison of quadratic, nonlinear, and mixed integer nonlinear MPC formulations and solvers on an air source heat pump hydronic floor heating system,” Journal of Building Performance Simulation, pp. 1–19. DOI
buildings.lbl.gov/publications/performance-comparison-quadratic
Chen, Y. et al. (2022) “Using discrete bayesian networks for diagnosing and isolating cross-level faults in HVAC systems,” Applied Energy, 327, p. 120050. DOI
buildings.lbl.gov/publications/using-discrete-bayesian-networks
Above is a sample of our recent publications -to find more, please visit buildings.lbl.gov/publications.
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Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (Berkeley Lab) is located in the Berkeley Hills near University of California (UC) Berkeley and conducts scientific research on behalf of the United States Department of Energy (DOE). The Laboratory overlooks the UC Berkeley.
Berkeley Lab addresses the world’s most urgent scientific challenges by advancing sustainable energy, protecting human health, creating new materials, and revealing the origin and fate of the universe. Founded in 1931, Berkeley Lab’s scientific expertise has been recognized with 14 Nobel prizes. The University of California manages Berkeley Lab for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science. For more information, visit www.lbl.gov.
DOE’s Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States, and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, see science.energy.gov.
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