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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.

PPG Industries, EETD Team up to Develop New Solar Reflective Pigments

April 7, 2014

From PPG Industries' press release:

PPG Industries' industrial coatings business has received a $224,000 award from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to help develop dark-colored pigments for cool metal roof and façade coatings that incorporate near-infrared (NIR) fluorescence and reflectance to improve energy performance.

The award is part of a $530,000 project that includes a $250,000 award to the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) to partner with PPG on the research and $56,000 in cost-sharing by PPG.

...

The goal of the PPG/Berkeley Lab program is to develop a more advanced class of dark-colored pigments that can convert a portion of the absorbed visible light energy into NIR energy that is radiated away from buildings.

The new pigment technology under investigation would be a significant advance over current cool-coating pigments. PPG and Berkeley Lab estimate that cool coatings based on the new pigment technology could achieve effective solar reflectance (ESR) values of 0.5 to 0.7 compared to ESR values of 0.1 to 0.3 for standard pigments. An ESR improvement of 0.4 and widespread deployment of coatings with these pigments for residential applications in warm and hot areas of the U.S. could save up to $1.3 billion annually in related energy costs.

Read the rest of the release at the link below.