News

In May 2024, UC Berkeley released its long-awaited Integrated Resource and Activation Plan (IRAP), which outlines the university’s path toward decarbonizing the energy that powers our campus through a “full utility infrastructure transformation”. The IRAP is a plan for...Read more about UC Berkeley’s Clean Energy Campus – A Sequential Plan for Success

Introduction

As global temperatures continue to rise and renewable energy costs plummet, the transition to clean energy has become both an environmental imperative and an economic opportunity. Solar panel costs have fallen over 80% since 2010...Read more about Energy Inequality and the Just Transition: How can we make the benefits of clean energy accessible to everyone?

Introduction

Our nation’s electric grid is an immensely complex system that is constantly balancing on a knife’s edge. Grid operators must ensure that energy supply meets demand every second: too much or too little supply will lead...Read more about Demand Response in the Green Energy Transition

Eight weeks before Earth’s two hottest days on record (July 21-22, 2024), Australia’s Northern Territory Government approved plans for fracking expansion in the Beetaloo Basin. The approval was granted to Tamboran Resources, a publicly traded natural gas exploration and drilling...Read more about Indigenous Ownership in Clean Energy is a Universal Imperative

Background

As the world races to find new, cutting-edge solutions to our climate crisis, one piece of ancient wisdom has been re-emerging as a ready-to-deploy option with multiple benefit streams. Biochar, a term derived from "biological charcoal,” is the...Read more about Rediscovering the Ancient Wisdom of Biochar

After a brief hiatus this spring, the BERC Blog is back! Today, I'll be interviewing Marcus Lehmann, the Co-Founder and CEO of CalWave Power Technologies and a former Visiting Scholar at UC Berkeley's Theoretical & Applied Fluid Dynamics Lab (TAFLab).

...Read more about Riding the Wave: A Conversation with CalWave's Marcus Lehmann

If you had to pick your favorite global energy event of the year, what would it be? Don’t worry, I’ll answer for you: BERC’s Energy Summit! Back and better than ever, the 2024 Energy Summit consisted of an impressive, varied array of speakers from different sectors within the energy industry....Read more about The Einstein of Energy Efficiency

Gigaton Potential

The emissions associated with the heat and power requirements of heavy industry amount to roughly 12 Gt of GHG emissions per year...Read more about Thermal Storage Solutions to Decarbonize Industrial Heat

On December 1^st, 2023, UC Berkeley’s Cleantech to Market (C2M) program hosted its 16^th annual Summit event in the Haas School of Business’ Spieker Forum. The day featured presentations on eight early-stage companies C2M students had worked with over the course of the Fall...Read more about Cleantech to Market Summit (C2M)

The 2023 Resources Symposium, organized with the ambitious goal of putting the ‘R’ back in Berkeley Energy & Resources Collaborative, took place on October 30th and 31st. This year’s topic was Mineral...Read more about Resources Symposium 2023 Highlights

Larger than ten blue whales, grayer than the eye of a hurricane, more daunting than that ten-page paper due in the morning. There are plenty of hyperboles available to describe the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Headquarters. I thought through a plethora of them as I walked into the office for...Read more about Banking the Energy Transition with the DOE's Loan Programs Office

I moved to the Bay Area in...Read more about Hillary’s Reflections Building Parakeet: From BERC Members to Co-Founders through Lean LaunchPad

Over the Fall 2022 semester, I wrote Subsidies for Direct Air Capture: Lessons From the Solar Industry. In the paper, I use solar – one of the few climate technologies with a history of subsidies – as a case study to project whether the subsidies in the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) have set...Read more about Did the Inflation Reduction Act Help Direct Air Capture?

There is something about craning your neck upwards and staring at the heavens that really makes you understand the scale of the climate transition. As we stood at the base of a wind turbine at Altamount Pass, we had to do exactly that to take in these massive structures. The height of the...Read more about Altamont Wind Farm Visit

Food production accounts for around 26% of all global greenhouse gas emissions. From land use to livestock, how we produce, supply, and consume food is a significant contributor to climate change. On April 7th, students, faculty, entrepreneurs, and companies, came together to address how to...Read more about AgTech and FoodTech Against Climate Change

On March 8th and 9th, the 2023 BERC Energy Summit was hosted in Spieker Forum at Haas. The much-anticipated event brought together 400 industry leaders, scientists, policymakers and students, to learn, network, and exchange ideas about the energy transition. The Summit was the 16th annual...Read more about Energy Summit 2023 Highlights

Welcome to a delayed but still relevant recap of Climate Change 101! As we get the blog active after a long Covid hiatus we are ironing out some logistics, but we are excited to be sharing event highlights and interesting energy and...Read more about Climate Change 101 Highlights

We are excited to highlight a new series of posts that will be shared on both the Berkeley Science Review (BSR) and Berkeley Energy and Resource Collaborative (BERC) platforms. These articles will showcase UC Berkeley’s innovation in energy and resource...Read more about New Blog and Collaboration!

When I learned of the hiring of Patti Poppe as CEO of PG&E, my thoughts went to the impressive number of women leading major utilities throughout the country. I wondered why the utility industry, rather than tech or healthcare, seems to have such a tremendous record of success for...Read more about Women in Energy: The Great Success of Female Utility CEOs