Two Berkeley Lab research projects were awarded grants by the Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) to advance energy technologies. The two grants total nearly $5 million. One will focus on smart window technologies and the other on thermal mapping of buildings.

Berkeley Lab scientists are exploring whether a common soil bacterium can be engineered to produce liquid transportation fuels much more efficiently than the ways in which advanced biofuels are made today. The process would be powered only by hydrogen and electricity. The goal is a biofuel—or electrofuel, as this new approach is called—that doesn’t require photosynthesis.

Researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) are working on a project that would modernize the grid and essentially bring it into the Internet age by using automated control software to manage demand in real time. The project has been awarded $2.865 million by the Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy, or ARPA-E, whose mission is to invest in potentially transformational energy technologies.

This week’s ARPA-E Summit features several Berkeley Lab-led projects, all aimed at dramatically improving how the U.S. produces and uses energy. Among them is an effort to produce transportation fuel from tobacco. The goal is to engineer tobacco plants that use energy from the sun to produce fuel molecules directly in their leaves.

Berkeley Lab researchers will play major roles in three new cutting-edge energy research projects being funded by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E). These three projects entail the development of tobacco as a source of biofuels, creation of a personalized system for reducing customer demands for electrical power when the grid is congested, and development of a commercial process for extracting biofuels from the resin of pine trees.

The battery research team at Berkeley Lab, recognized as one of the best in the country, is engaged in high-risk, high-reward research, striving for technology breakthroughs as well as incremental advances. Their work could help drive a transformation of the vehicle industry and make electric vehicles as common as laptops and cell phones for American consumers.

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, known for having one of the top research programs in the country for batteries and fuel cells for vehicle applications, has decided to enter another area in the battery world. It has been granted $1.6 million in American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funds to develop a novel storage device for the electric grid.

A new class of materials with a record-shattering internal surface area may have the right stuff to efficiently strip carbon dioxide from a power plant’s exhaust. Lab scientists hope to find out soon.

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) has been awarded $8.6 million in Recovery Act funding for what the DOE calls “ambitious research projects that could fundamentally change the way the country uses and produces energy.” The money will go towards four separate projects: one that will speed the development [...]