To broaden and accelerate its efforts at poverty alleviation Berkeley Lab announces the launch of the LBNL Institute for Globally Transformative Technologies (LIGTT, pronounced “light”). Its ambitious mandate is to foster the discovery, development, and deployment of a generation of technologies that will advance sustainable methods to fight global poverty.

Middle-income households account for one-third of total U.S. residential energy use. A new Berkeley Lab report identifies steps that can deliver significant savings on their home energy bills.

A recent Journal of Climate paper by Stanford’s Mark Jacobson and John Ten Hoeve (2011) on urban heat islands and cool roofs is a useful contribution to the literature. However, their results regarding white roofs are preliminary and uncertain. Along with work at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, other published papers have addressed the broader benefits of white roofs. These studies taken together raise important issues that need to be considered from a policy standpoint to fully understand the potential of more reflective (white or cool) surfaces.

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.

Scientists from Berkeley Lab have teamed up with students from the University of California (UC), Berkeley to run a series of efficiency tests comparing the traditional Haiti cookstove with a variety of low-cost, commercially available alternatives. The long-term goal is to find the safest and most fuel-efficient stove—or to design a new one that would win favor with the cooks of Haiti—and tap the resources of nonprofit aid organizations to subsidize its manufacture in local metal shops.

Berkeley Lab researchers at the Molecular Foundry have unveiled a semiconductor nanocrystal coating material capable of controlling heat from the sun while remaining transparent. This system, the first to selectively control the amount of near infrared radiation transmitted, could add a critical energy-saving dimension to “smart window” coatings.

Berkeley Lab scientists and their colleagues have discovered a new relation among electric and magnetic fields and differences in temperature, which can form swirling vortices of electrons and holes in semiconductor devices and emit sideways magnetic fields. Understanding the unusual new effect may lead to more efficient thermoelectric devices, which convert heat into electricity or electricity into heat.

A new study from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) breaks new ground by using a high-resolution model of the continental United States that incorporates land-surface feedback to probe the effects of deploying light-colored roads and rooftops. Berkeley Lab researchers Dev Millstein and Surabi Menon found that atmospheric feedback—such as changes in cloud cover or precipitation—does have an important effect, resulting in different amounts of cooling in different cities, but that cool roofs and pavements are still beneficial for combating global warming.

Like a giant, life-size set of building blocks, the new User Test Bed Facility will allow researchers and manufacturers to test buildings systems and components under “real-world” conditions by swapping out systems and changing configurations and then allow rigorous monitoring of performance of every key building element that impacts energy consumption.

Paris may have the Eiffel Tower and London has its Big Ben, but Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has the iconic domed roof of the Advanced Light Source. Now the ALS is getting a new roof—and not just any roof but a cool roof that will reflect sunlight back into the atmosphere, thus playing a small part in mitigating global warming.