Abridged SP FINAL-DIGITAL - Flipbook - Page 5
• We have also created the Berkeley Lab
Energy Storage Center, established the
National Alliance for Water Innovation,
and been awarded management of the
CalFlexHub consortium by the State of
California — all advancing the strategic
goals articulated in this plan.
Evolution of Our Response to the
Climate Crisis
Despite the tangible impacts of our legacy
of research, a number of challenges have
hastened the release of this Strategic Plan
update: the escalating uncertainty of a changing
climate, the emergence of a global pandemic,
and increased natural disasters, in both
volume and intensity. There is consensus in the
scientific community that focusing on mitigation
as the only strategy for addressing the climate
crisis will not be sufficient. We need to research
scalable ideas for adaptation and negative
emissions at the same time.
Art Rosenfeld:
A legend in the field of energy efficiency
Art Rosenfeld, who was trained as a particle physicist
and was Enrico Fermi’s last graduate student, is known
for developing the scientific field of energy efficiency.
When the energy crisis hit in the 1970s, Art pivoted to
developing practical applications. He founded Berkeley
Lab’s Center for Building Science, the precursor to ETA,
and pioneered the field of energy-efficiency research.
Rosenfeld was awarded the National Medal of Science
in 2013 by President Obama, won the Tang Prize in
2016, and is the only scientist at Berkeley Lab to have
a unit of energy named after him. A “Rosenfeld” is an
electricity savings of 3 billion kilowatt-hours per year,
which is the amount needed to replace the annual
generation of a 500-megawatt coal-fired power plant.
Our Strategic Plan invests in the kinds of NETs
discussed in Negative Emissions Technologies and
Reliable Sequestration: A Research Agenda.1 These
technologies and strategies will play a large
role in limiting average global temperature rise.
A diverse portfolio of technologies will evolve
over the next several years, including enhanced
weathering; direct air capture; bioenergy with
carbon capture and sequestration; ocean
fertilization, alkalinity enhancement, and direct
capture; land carbon sink management; and
coastal ecosystems. ETA will focus on scientific
foundations for NETs, pathways that accelerate
market uptake of those technologies, and on
policies and toolkits that measure and validate
their performance.
1 National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine
2019. Negative Emissions Technologies and Reliable Sequestration: A Research Agenda. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/25259.
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