EETD Communications

How do you buy power from renewable energy providers, or make the case for the business benefits of green power? A new document, incorporating technical advice from researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, as well as other institutions, can show the way.

The Guide to Purchasing Green Power is a joint product of four key agencies who are supporting the development of green power markets: the DOE’s Federal Energy Management Program (FEMP), the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Green Power Partnership, the Sustainable Enterprise Program of the World Resources Institute (WRI), and the Green-e Renewable Energy Certification Program administered by the Center for Resource Solutions.

The Guide answers questions about renewable energy and green power, focusing on electricity from renewable sources. It describes environmental benefits and provides organizations with guidelines on how to procure green power and understand green power product certification and verification. Finally, sections of the Guide describe how organizations can approach the development of on-site renewable power generation.

Download it here:
http://www.epa.gov/greenpower/buygreenpower/guide.htm
http://www.thegreenpowergroup.org/publications.html

A new study by researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory suggests that renewable energy and energy efficiency can help keep natural gas price increases in check. The study, titled “Easing the Natural Gas Crisis: Reducing Natural Gas Prices through Increased Deployment of Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency,” was written by Ryan Wiser, Mark Bolinger and Matt St. Clair.

“Our report shows that renewable energy and energy efficiency can displace gas-fired electricity generation, reducing gas demand and putting downward pressure on natural gas prices and bills,” says Wiser.

You can download “Easing the Natural Gas Crisis: Reducing Natural Gas Prices through Increased Deployment of Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency,” LBNL56756, from http://eetd.lbl.gov/ea/ems/re-pubs.html.

Dr. Thomas E. McKone, a senior scientist in the Environmental Energy Technologies Division, and adjunct professor in the School of Public Health at UC Berkeley, and a colleague at the National Environmental Engineering Research Institute in India have published a paper examining the use of fuzzy logic in risk assessment and environmental modeling. The article, which appears on the cover of the January 15 issue of Environmental Science and Policy, applies fuzzy logic to the problem of assessing the water quality of the Ganges River in India, and judging whether two locations are “safe” for bathing. Bathing in the Ganges plays a significant role in Indian religious ritual.

The paper is titled “Can Fuzzy Logic Bring Complex Environmental Problems Into Focus?”
[McKone, T.E. and Deshpande, A.W., Environmental Science and Technology, vol 39, Issue 2, pp 42A-45A.]

Here is a link to this publication: http://pubs.acs.org/journals/esthag/index_magazine.html

First some information on nomenclature, and myths I’d like to help dispel.

The confusing names of local institutions, and myths they help spawn. Berkeley Lab is frequently mistaken for Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Livermore Lab is located in the city of Livermore, California, which is southeast of here, although within commuting distance. They have a different mission from ours. All of Berkeley Lab’s work is unclassified, basic scientific research. Livermore Lab has a classified mission related in part to maintenance of the nation’s stockpile of nuclear weapons, although they also conduct unclassified basic research.

Livermore Lab is in Livermore! And Berkeley Lab is, of course, in the city of Berkeley, California. (http://www.lbl.gov/)

Both Labs have ”Lawrence” in the name. And there is yet another institution named after E.O. Lawrence, the Berkeley physicist and inventor of the cyclotron (the device that was often called an “atom smasher” in the early days)—that institution is the Lawrence Hall of Science. The LHS is a wonderful science museum, high up in the Berkeley Hills that also trains teachers and helps develop science curricula for schools all over the country. They are not associated with Berkeley Lab. If you’re in the Bay area, I hope you have a chance to go and visit their displays. Check them out there: http://www.lhs.berkeley.edu/

All three of these institutions are (at least as of this writing) operated by the University of California, hence the frequent confusion. I am hoping that, among other things, this blog will help form a unique identity for Berkeley Lab in the minds of its readers, and dispel some of the confusion about what we do up here in the Berkeley hills.

I also reiterate that I am going to be focusing on one of the Lab’s 17 Divisions only, the Environmental Energy Technologies Division. For information about the rest of the Lab’s work , see the wealth of information at http://www.lbl.gov/.

Our Division’s name. Some of you who have worked in this field for many years know that while we are called the Environmental Energy Technologies Division now, we have, at various times in the past, been called the Energy and Environment Division. Formal names aside, our research focuses on energy efficiency and environmental sciences.

I have chosen to call this the Berkeley Lab Energy and Environmental Research blog, in the hope of being appropriately descriptive about what we do, without using the Division’s actual name. Since I plan to mention research in other Divisions and other institutions from time to time, I think the generic name for the blog will be an accurate description of what you’ll find here.

A few blog rules and practices. I won’t belabor these, since there are plenty of other blog and web experts struggling to frame corporate blog policy conventions that the rest of us bloggers can adopt or adapt.

Obviously, any opinions expressed here are my own, not those of the University of California, or the Department of Energy, or any of my colleagues here. I do not plan to use this blog to express opinions or chat about daily life, but “editorial choice” is a form of opinion, and I’ll take all responsibility for my own.

We are a scientific research institution, so accuracy and correct information are among our most important values. I will correct any factual mistakes made in this blog that I become aware of.

Since my purpose is to draw your attention to the many reports and papers coming from our researchers, I will typically give you a report title, names of authors, and a way to obtain a copy of the report (usually, but not always, by web download). If it’s a journal article, you’ll get the standard reference citation, and if they are online, I’ll try to provide a web address. I’ll usually quote a line or two from the relevant abstract or executive summary. In this way, I hope to render an accurate impression of the report’s content.

Sometimes we’ll have whole new websites come online describing project results, where many reports are available, so I’ll provide a website address.

We plan to make it possible for you, the reader, to comment on my blog entries. This will be an experiment—if answering comments becomes too draining on my time, or if other problems crop up that we can’t solve, the blog will have to revert to a non-comment mode.

Nonetheless, I’m excited that blogging has opened up a new way for us to do a better job of disseminating research results, so I hope that we can turn this experiment into a successful enterprise, and perhaps pave the way for others at Berkeley Lab to do the same.

Welcome to the Berkeley Lab Energy and Environmental Research blog. My name is Allan Chen, and I am the leader of a communications group in the Environmental Energy Technologies Division of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab for short), located in Berkeley, California. I also serve as a media relations specialist for this area of research at Berkeley Lab (http://www.lbl.gov/).

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory is a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) -sponsored National Lab that conducts unclassified research in basic science. We are adjacent to the campus of the University of California, Berkeley, (http://www.berkeley.edu/) and in fact we are operated by the University of California (http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/) for DOE (http://energy.gov/). Many staff members at Berkeley Lab teach on campus, and a number of campus faculty have joint appointments here at Berkeley Lab. We also have students from campus working in many capacities.

The purpose of this blog is to tell its readers about research in the fields of energy efficiency, the environmental sciences, and related areas, that we conduct here at Berkeley Lab.

Why a blog? We already send out press releases about Berkeley Lab research (see this page to sign up for email delivery: http://www.lbl.gov/Science-Articles/News-Releases.html).

We also have an online science news magazine called Science Beat that reports on other research (sign up for email notification whenever a new issue is posted here: http://enews.lbl.gov/).

I publish a quarterly newsletter covering news from our Division, the EETD News. (Sign up for free email delivery by sending an email request to JoAnne Lambert, JMLambert@lbl.gov), or signing up here: http://eetd2.lbl.gov/sub/form_mail.php. Also see http://eetd.lbl.gov/newsletter.

The reason I wanted to start a blog is that our Division of the Lab, which has more than 300 staff members, typically produces dozens of Berkeley Lab reports, journal articles and conference papers per year in many different fields – the number could be in the hundreds, I’ve never counted up our yearly publication rate. We are one of 17 scientific Divisions at the Lab.

I believe that our reports could be useful to many people working in our fields of research, as well as the commercial sector, and the general public, who don’t know that these reports are available, not just the scientists and colleagues in “practitioner communities” who already read them.

The Environmental Energy Technologies Division’s mission is this:

to perform research and development leading to better energy technologies and reduction of adverse energy-related environmental impacts.

We conduct research in energy-efficient technologies for buildings, indoor environmental quality, atmospheric sciences, analysis of end uses of energy in the U.S. and the world, and advanced energy technologies, including better batteries, fuel cells, and lower-emission combustion.

Our Division is home to a wide range of experts, from physicists and chemists, architects, programmers, and several varieties of engineer, to economists and policy analysts—a testament to how the energy and environmental sciences engage nearly every scientific discipline you can name.

So with this blog, I plan to call your attention to reports, publications, books, software releases, field demonstrations, conferences, and miscellanea that do not make it into Berkeley Lab’s formal press releases or its Science Beat magazine. (These two outlets, after all, have enough to do, covering us and the other 16 scientific divisions of the Lab.) Even our 12-page EETD newsletter can only cover so much.

Most of these blog entries will deal with work originating here in the Environmental Energy Technologies Division, but because we do collaborate with our colleagues in other divisions of Berkeley Lab, at UC Berkeley and many other universities around the world, other National Laboratories, and private companies, I will occasionally refer you to these partners of ours.

Who are you? Well, you know who you are, but I suspect that you will include:

- the scientific community,
- students of all kinds,
- educators and trainers working with students at all levels, from elementary to graduate and professional training,
- program officers at agencies that fund these fields,
- policy makers looking for sound, unbiased scientific information to help you in your own work,
- building and facilities managers interested in energy efficiency to save money on your energy bills, and create more comfortable surroundings for your facility’s occupants (while doing something to help preserve our environment),
- other practitioner communities such as architects and engineers in building design; software programmers in building simulation and energy science; financial analysts interested in the economy’s energy flows, and the products that require energy to run; and indoor environmental quality consultants, among others,
- private sector companies looking for interesting new technologies to license and turn into products (see our Tech Transfer Dept, http://www.lbl.gov/Tech-Transfer/index.html ),
- overworked, underpaid journalists and writers (I used to be one),
- our host city’s, (Berkeley’s) community members, as well as those from our surrounding neighborhood communities such as Oakland, Emeryville, Albany, El Cerrito, and more distant places— San Francisco, San Jose and the rest of Silicon Valley, and the greater Bay area,
- curious members of the general public everywhere, and
- everyone else I’ve forgotten to mention.

The old fact checker in me (magazine staff fact checker was my first job) notes that although most of the Lab is physically in Berkeley, a small portion is located within Oakland city limits, so we proudly call both of these cities our host communities.

I’ll end this first long post here, but I’ve got another one coming right up.

This Blog is a service of the Communications Office, Environmental Energy Technologies Division, of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
LBNL is a research institution managed by the University of California, under contract to the U.S. Department of Energy.