Berkeley: Radical Hotbed of Energy Efficiency

Energy Secretary nominee Chu on energy, climate

from Green Tech by Martin LaMonica

President-elect Barack Obama's reported choices for the top energy and environment officials set the stage for a dramatic change in policy on energy and climate change.

Citing Democratic sources, news outlets on Wednesday reported that Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Chu will be named Energy Secretary.

Nobel-prize winning physicist Steven

Berkeley: Radical Hotbed of Energy Efficiency

December 10, 2008 at 11:16 PM

With the appointment of Steve Chu as the Secretary of Energy, it becomes official: Berkeley is the world capital of efficiency.

Chu, the director of Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, has been one of the leading advocates of trying to curb fuel consumption through things like designing buildings better for their environment.

Chu follows in the footsteps of Art Rosenfeld, who taught at the University of California and worked at the lab for decades. A physicist (Enrico Fermi’s last grad student), Rosenfeld convinced the state of California to past stringent energy efficiency laws and appliance standards in the 1970s. Since then, electricity consumption in California has stayed roughly flat in per capita terms: It has doubled elsewhere in the country.

From 1974 to 1994, Rosenfeld directed the Center for Building Science. He is now with the California Energy Commission.

Other notable scientists working on energy efficiency in Berkeley include Arun Majumdar, the Almy and Agnes Maynard professor of mechanical engineering, and Steve Selkowitz, who now runs the Center for Building Science...