Home Energy Saver, a Berkeley Lab program designed to help consumers identify the best ways to save energy in their homes, is being used by the Microsoft Corporation in its new Web-based home energy management service Hohm. The Hohm service provides homeowners with a Web-based tool to help them manage their home energy use more effectively.

Producing new commercial buildings that use 80 percent less energy than today’s buildings is a new target in the fight against global climate change. Berkeley Lab researchers are developing the technologies that will help make this possible.

A new data model developed by researchers at the Berkeley Lab and their colleagues at other universities and in the private sector will help facilities and buildings save power through automated demand response technology, and advance the development of the Smart Grid.

After analyzing records from a decade’s worth of solar power installations, Berkeley Lab researchers conclude that overall costs have declined significantly because of decreases in associated expenses such as labor and overhead – most likely because of federal, state, and local support for solar photovoltaic systems.

Research by Mark Mendell and Anna Mirer of Berkeley Lab’s Environmental Energy Technologies Division suggests that operating buildings in ways designed to save energy – with indoor temperatures slightly cooler in winter and warmer in summer – not only saves energy but improves the health of the occupants and makes them more comfortable besides.

Researchers tackling some of the most challenging scientific problems, from improving energy efficiency in combustion devices to developing new particle accelerators for scientific discovery to studying properties of new materials, have been awarded access to supercomputing resources at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center.

Berkeley Lab and the University of California, Berkeley have announced a joint research and development program in which researchers will work with the government and private sector of India to develop paths toward reducing greenhouse gas emissions while maintaining sustained economic growth.

Mark Levine heads Berkeley Lab’s China Energy Group, created in 1988 to further energy efficiency by working with Chinese organizations. In this interview Levine discusses his testimony before the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission on China’s energy policies and their environmental impacts.