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Energy Technologies Area (ETA) researchers are continually building on the strong scientific foundation we have developed over the past 50 years. We address the world’s most pressing climate challenges by bringing to market energy-efficient innovations across the buildings, transportation, and industrial sectors. ETA is at the forefront of developing better batteries for electric vehicles; improving the country's aging electrical grid and innovating distributed energy and storage solutions; developing grid-interactive, efficient buildings; and providing the most comprehensive market and data analysis worldwide for renewable technologies like wind and solar.
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The Energy Technologies Area (ETA) Strategic Plan is the guiding force for our research and development for the next ten years. It clearly charts a path toward clean-energy solutions and focuses on five detailed Strategic Initiatives. The Plan provides an in-depth look at how ETA is accelerating research to provide affordable, clean energy to all while accomplishing deep, economy-wide decarbonization, looking to avoid a rise in global average temperature while simultaneously developing solutions to increase humanity's resilience to extreme weather volatility.
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The Energy Technologies Area (ETA) is unique in translating fundamental scientific discoveries into scalable technology adoption. Our approach combines an understanding of the marketplace and the role of state and federal regulation and policies. ETA's research drives real-world, practical results that affect and improve the everyday lives of Americans and those across the globe. Saving energy and battling the Climate Crisis are key to the foundation of our research, which is driven by technoeconomic analysis and in-lab experimentation and discovery.

OpenADR 2.0 Receives Big Boost from California’s Investor-Owned Utilities

December 18, 2012

The OpenADR 2.0 standard for automated demand response (DR) received a hearty vote of confidence recently when the three California investor-owned utilities announced that they will ask their technology partners to adopt it in 2013. Originally developed at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s (Berkeley Lab’s) Demand Response Research Center, the open standard supports emergency and price-based electricity dispatch between the utilities and their customers.

Spurred by support from the OpenADR Alliance and technology vendors, adoption of the OpenADR standard has been growing in recent years, with many companies releasing OpenADR 2.0a-compliant products in 2012 (see “OpenADR Continues to Move the Smart Grid Forward”). OpenADR 2.0b, slated to be released at the end of 2012, is expected to provide some fine-tuning of the standard, with features such as faster internet response times and a flexible reporting mechanism for data reports and wholesale DR markets.

OpenADR is already used to manage DR in more than 10 countries and manages about 260 megawatts of DR in California alone. This move by San Diego Gas & Electric, Pacific Gas and Electric, and Southern California Edison will continue to increase the standard’s use in the state and further solidify its use as an effective common standard worldwide.

Development of OpenADR was funded primarily by the California Energy Commission.