Berkeley Lab Finds Effective Directions for Energy Research

It’s a grand challenge: develop clean, sustainable technologies that deliver a low-carbon energy future, and through innovation, create jobs, new markets, and exports, and increase America’s energy security. 

Researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have made it their mission to develop low-carbon and energy-efficient technologies such as advanced materials and information technology for buildings; next-generation biofuels; new battery, fuel cell, and thermoelectric energy-storage technologies; and carbon capture and sequestration technologies. This Lab-wide effort is called Carbon Cycle 2.0, bringing together teams of scientists from throughout Berkeley Lab to do the R&D for sustainable energy solutions, at the lab where modern team-based science was first developed and practiced in the 1930s, by founding Director Ernest O. Lawrence.

But what impact will these technologies—still in the laboratory, not yet in the marketplace—actually have? How much will they reduce energy, water and materials use throughout their life cycles, how much could they mitigate climate change, and what are their health and economic impacts?

Scientists in Berkeley Lab’s Environmental Energy Technologies Division (EETD), in cooperation with colleagues throughout the Lab, have formed a team to evaluate these impacts: the Carbon Cycle 2.0 Energy and Environmental Analysis Team (E2AT), led by EETD’s Eric Masanet.

“It’s a fairly new approach for the Lab,” says Masanet, “to use the analytic lenses we’ve developed here in EETD to analyze the costs, and energy, water, materials and climate change impacts of technologies that are still in the research and development phases. This effort is scientifically much more challenging than analyses of technologies that are already in the marketplace.”

“The ultimate goal of the work,” he adds, “is to provide guidance to scientists, funding agencies, and policymakers about which technology options are the most beneficial to pursue—which have the largest potential impact cost-effectively.”

Read the rest: http://eetd.lbl.gov/news-archives/news-carbon-cycle-finds.html

Contact FacilitiesNet Editorial Staff »   posted on: 10/21/2011