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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.

EETD's Art Rosenfeld to Receive National Medal of Technology and Innovation in 2013

December 23, 2012

The White House has announced that Art Rosenfeld, Scientist Emeritus of the Environmental Energy Technologies Division, will receive the National Meda of Technology and Innovation.

The National Medal of Technology and Innovation was created by statute in 1980 and is administered for the White House by the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Patent and Trademark Office. The award recognizes those who have made lasting contributions to America’s competitiveness and quality of life and helped strengthen the Nation’s technological workforce. Nominees are selected by a distinguished independent committee representing the private and public sectors.

“I am proud to honor these inspiring American innovators,” President Obama said. “They represent the ingenuity and imagination that has long made this Nation great—and they remind us of the enormous impact a few good ideas can have when these creative qualities are unleashed in an entrepreneurial environment.”

With a decades-long career in energy analysis and standards, Rosenfeld is often credited with billions of dollars in energy savings and is viewed by many as “the godfather of energy efficiency.” He started his career at UC Berkeley and Berkeley Lab in the 1950s as a physicist in the Nobel Prize-winning particle physics group of Luis Alvarez. However, in 1974, he decided to switch his focus to energy and the environment. He founded the Center for Building Science at Berkeley Lab’s Environmental Energy Technologies Division (EETD) in 1975, where a broad range of energy efficiency concepts, analysis tools, policy ideas and technologies were developed over the next 20 years.

"Art's long-standing efforts in the field of energy efficiency have truly changed the way we think about energy today,” said Berkeley Lab Director Paul Alivisatos. “He epitomizes the spirit of Berkeley Lab with his dedication and innovation. This honor is well-deserved."

“We are thrilled with this award to Art. It is a wonderful and timely recognition of his towering leadership role in the US and internationally in understanding and capturing energy efficiency as a resource,” says EETD Division Director Ashok Gadgil. “We are very pleased and proud he helped found this division, and that after his careers at the Department of Energy and the California Energy Commission, he returned here as Distinguished Scientist Emeritus.”