ETA 2021 Strategic Plan - Flipbook - Page 4
Lawrence Berkeley
National Laboratory
Energy Technologies Area
Pivoting to Tackle the World’s
Most Critical Challenges
Transforming Ideas into Solutions
ETA distinguishes itself from other national
laboratories, and from other areas within
Berkeley Lab, by translating fundamental
scientific discoveries into energy technology
innovation and deployment while incorporating
economic analysis and a data-driven policy
perspective. We live at the intersection of
technology, policy, and economics. We use
techno-economic analyses — focusing on
energy efficiency, technology, and systems
at every stage of our research. This supports
policymakers and supplies the insights required
for them to make informed decisions.
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Our approach combines an understanding of
the marketplace — energy markets, markets for
services, consumer durables, and equipment
— and the role of federal and state regulation
and policies. Our research has driven realworld results that affect the everyday lives of
Americans and those across the globe.
In this refresh to our 2017 Strategic Plan we aim
to accelerate our research to provide affordable
clean energy to all while accomplishing deep
economy-wide decarbonization to both, avoid a
greater than 2°C degree rise in global average
temperature, and simultaneously developing
solutions to increase humanity’s resilience
to more extreme weather volatility. We also
identify and respond to the clear and present
need to bring negative emissions technologies –
methodologies that directly remove carbon from
the atmosphere – into reality at a rapid pace.
The Evolution of ETA’s Five Strategic Initiatives
In our 2017 Strategic Plan we assessed our
capabilities and core competencies, then
mapped those to the challenges we saw as the
most critical. Each Strategic Initiative in that plan:
• Used a process to establish a baseline
• Defined an ambitious, broad goal with
measurable outcomes
• Articulated the research pathways that
would be needed to make progress toward
the goal
Each of those original initiatives focused on a set
of four to eight meaningful projects that enabled
us to quantitatively measure progress toward
the high-level initiative goal. Those goals were to
cut building energy consumption in half by 2030;
reduce transportation petroleum use by 50% in
the same time frame; reinvent the grid for 50%
distributed renewable energy; reduce the cost
of delivered potable water from nontraditional
sources; and reduce the time needed for cleanenergy materials discovery to scale up.
Since 2017, we have made significant progress
toward all of these goals.
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