Berkeley Lab broke ground on the start of construction for the Facility for Low-Energy eXperiments on Buildings (FLEXLAB). Like a life-size set of building blocks, FLEXLAB is the first of its kind in both size and scope, and will allow researchers and manufacturers to test building systems and components under “real-world” conditions.

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.

The Lemelson-MIT Program today announced Ashok Gadgil as the recipient of the 2012 $100,000 Lemelson-MIT Award for Global Innovation in recognition of his steady pursuit to blend research, invention, and humanitarianism for broad social impact. Gadgil is the director of the Environmental Energy Technologies Division of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), and a Professor of Environmental Engineering at UC Berkeley.

Ashok Gadgil, a scientist at U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), has won the Lifetime Achievement award of the 2012 Zayed Future Energy Prize. The $3.5 million Zayed Future Energy Prize recognizes and rewards innovation, leadership and longterm vision in renewable energy and sustainability.

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory aims to change the status quo by reviving the study of rare earths to better understand how to extract them, use them more efficiently, reuse and recycle them and find substitutes for them.

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.

Lithium-ion batteries power everything from smart phones to electric cars, but especially when it comes to lowering the cost and extending the range of all-electric vehicles, they need to store a lot more energy. The critical component for energy storage is the anode, and Berkeley Lab scientists have developed a new anode material that can absorb eight times the lithium and has far greater energy capacity than today’s designs.

Berkeley Lab researchers have built a high-capacity energy storage device for lithium ion batteries by constructing a unique nanoscale sandwich of graphene and tin. The device is engineered to improve electrochemical cycling of the battery, which reduces charging time and allows repeated recharging without degrading battery performance.