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ACEEE Summer Study and Zero Energy Homes

August 22, 2006 on 6:45 pm | In Uncategorized | No Comments

Last week I attended the ACEEE Summer Study program. Attending an event with such a diverse attendance list is always interesting, proof of which being talks on performance contracting for homes (read: micro-ESCO’s for those in the energy world, and still not a scalable business model) and why Louisiana should be reconstructed with pre-fabricated modular homes with air conditioning to reduce energy consumption (although apparantely most pre-Katrina homes were sans A/C by preference). A good portion of the event involved zero energy homes — the concept of a energy-sustainable home using on-site renewable energy, mainly from photovoltaic panels. And while current zero energy homes (of which there hundreds in California) aren’t quite *zero* energy, drastic order-of-magnitude reductions in electricity bills are common among home owner’s. The prevailing focus on zero peak-energy communities was highlighted in a discussion section led by Lew Pratsch from DOE and Jeff Christian from ORNL — a system-level acknowledgement for residential peak energy management that I was suprised and delighted to see. So what was missing? User information. By and large, the excellent efforts to design high-performance energy efficient homes still leave the home owner out of the information loop.

Residential energy management research featured on ABC7 news

August 14, 2006 on 10:15 am | In Uncategorized | No Comments

The residential energy management research here at UC Berkeley was recently featured on ABC 7 news. The segment (available here) features the REM system. The segment makes an important point that energy convservation at the residential level is about “picking up pennies” — system-level conservation relies on many houses conserving “incremental” amounts of energy, as described by Severin Borenstein, director of the University of California Energy Institute. The surge in interest about energy-related technologies is highlighted by the July heat wave that affected most of the United States, resulting in numerous power outages and deaths across the country — interest that is also catching on in the venture capital world as “energy efficiency looks sexier”!