Summit on Energy Efficiency (Audio)

David Erne leads smart grid research for the California Energy Commission’s Energy Research and Development Division. In this role, he manages a portfolio of research initiatives to improve electric system reliability and resilience for customers. Series: "Institute for Energy Efficiency" [Science] [Show ID: 36797]

Debra Perrone is an Assistant Professor of UCSB’s Environmental Studies Program. Deb integrates research methods from engineering, physical science, and law to inform water sustainability and policy. Series: "Institute for Energy Efficiency" [Science] [Show ID: 36804]

Raj Yavatkar is Chief Technology Officer at Juniper Networks. He leads and executes the company’s critical innovations and products for intelligent self-driving networks, security, Mobile Edge Cloud, network virtualization, packet-optical integration, and hybrid cloud. Series: "Institute for Energy Efficiency" [Science] [Show ID: 36798]

John Bowers is a Professor of Electrical & Computer Engineering at UC Santa Barbara. He is interested in energy efficiency and the development of novel low power optoelectronic devices for the next generation of optical networks. Series: "Institute for Energy Efficiency" [Science] [Show ID: 36801]

Katharine Schmidtke is Director of Sourcing for ASICs and Custom Silicon at Facebook, the world’s largest social network and one of the five largest hyperscale-datacenter operators in the world. In this role she directs sourcing strategy for Facebook’s inference and video transcoding ASICs, and next generation interconnect technology. Series: "Institute for Energy Efficiency" [Science] [Show ID: 36799]

Stuart Woolf is President and CEO of Woolf Farming & Processing, a family owned operation whose primary business is the production and processing of agricultural commodities. Series: "Institute for Energy Efficiency" [Science] [Agriculture] [Show ID: 36802]

Sangwon Suh is a professor at the Bren School of Environmental Science and Management at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research focuses on the sustainability of the human-nature complexity through the understanding of materials and energy exchanges between them. Series: "Institute for Energy Efficiency" [Science] [Show ID: 36794]

Sila Kiliccote, CEO & co-founder of eIQMobility, has over 15 years of experience in building and leading teams to deliver impactful and innovative research in demand response, vehicle-to-grid, and data analytics for the electricity grid. Series: "Institute for Energy Efficiency" [Science] [Show ID: 36793]

Steven DenBaars is a Professor of Materials, Electrical & Computer Engineering at UC Santa Barbara. His research interests include growth of wide-bandgap (GaN based) semiconductors and their application to blue LEDs as well as laser and high power electronic devices. Series: "Institute for Energy Efficiency" [Science] [Show ID: 36795]

William Wang is the Director of UC Santa Barbara's Natural Language Processing group and Center for Responsible Machine Learning. Series: "Institute for Energy Efficiency" [Science] [Show ID: 36800]

Transforming our energy infrastructure to support greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reduction goals will require the deployment of technologies such as electric vehicles and energy storage. Improper integration of these technologies into the electric grid and a lack of careful planning of their scale, however, can significantly reduce their real-world effectiveness in supporting GHG emissions reduction goals. Research by Brian Tarroja and his colleagues at UC Irvine presented here focus on identifying grid integration needs and life cycle planning considerations for electric vehicles and energy storage deployment to better ensure that their potential GHG benefits are fully realized in future electricity systems. Series: "Institute for Energy Efficiency" [Science] [Show ID: 35164]

Decarbonizing our electricity and transportation sectors will require large deployments of wind, solar, and storage. Ranjit Deshmukh develops models for planning and operations of low carbon electricity grids and analyzes tradeoffs between economic, environmental, and social objectives for regions in the U.S., India, and Africa. These models optimize wind, solar, and other generation, demand, and storage resources for region-specific conditions including spatial and temporal variability of renewable resources. Series: "Institute for Energy Efficiency" [Science] [Show ID: 35165]

California's recent drought has highlighted the need for a reliable source of water. Peter Stricker of SeaWell presents a reverse osmosis (RO) system to address climate-driven drought which is an entirely new approach to water supply. The SeaWell buoy is a self-contained floating vessel, moored to the sea floor, with seawater intake and brine diffusion outfall. It contains reverse osmosis equipment, electric power and water piping, and can permeate water at a rate of 950–3,800 acre-feet/year. The implementation plan is to deploy pilot SeaWell Buoys at a water cost already below the cost of State water,initially partnering with water districts to deploy five water portals. Landing sites could be chosen based in previously disturbed areas, such as decommissioned oil receiving facilities and sanitary district outfalls. These deployments will augment new water reuse projects, and share siting and infrastructure. Series: "Institute for Energy Efficiency" [Science] [Show ID: 35163]

Increasingly, Internet-of-Things (IoT) applications require energy efficiency, low-latency, privacy and security of code and data, and programming support that simplifies IoT software development and deployment. UCSB Professor of Computer Science Chandra Krintz presents a new distributed software platform and programming model that addresses these requirements for the next generation of IoT applications. Her research lab (the UCSB RACELab) develops novel approaches to code portability for heterogenous devices and IoT tiers, energy efficiency for resource-constrained execution, privacy and security control, and integration of IoT services (e.g. data analytics, machine learning, artificial intelligence, etc.), and automated, multi-tier application deployment and management at scale — which together enable write-once, run-anywhere software development for IoT. Series: "Institute for Energy Efficiency" [Science] [Show ID: 35162]

Global prosperity over the last century has been powered by low-cost fossil fuels. Unfortunately, they are a finite resource and pose significant risks to our environment; therefore, they must be replaced. For the transition to a future energy economy making use of hydrogen as a fuel produced by nuclear power and renewables, Professor Eric McFarland predicts that methane will be the most important molecule for prosperity in the next century. McFarland’s research has shown that the methane in abundant natural gas can be cost-effectively converted by pyrolysis in high-temperature molten metals and salts to solid carbon and hydrogen gas. The cheapest heat and electricity in the U.S. comes from burning natural gas; however, increasingly major markets (e.g. California and Germany) have imposed carbon taxes which make this CO2-free process competitive today. Series: "Institute for Energy Efficiency" [Science] [Show ID: 35161]

Southern California Edison has a goal to reduce carbon-emissions 40% below 1990 levels by 2030, with an electric grid supplied by 80% carbon-free sources. Gary Barsley discusses SCE's pathway to clean power and electrification, reduced greenhouse gas emissions, and cleaning the power grid by decarbonizing the electric sector, electrifying the transportation sector, and electrifying buildings. SCE Emerging Products projects include assessing a number of new technologies to help achieve these important goals. Series: "Institute for Energy Efficiency" [Science] [Show ID: 35160]

Our planet is experiencing worldwide growth in energy consumption and CO2 emission and is experiencing temperature rise and climate change at an accelerating rate. This video introduces the Institute for Energy Efficiency at UC Santa Barbara and describes a path to reducing our energy consumption and CO2 emission. In his talk, John Bowers, Director of the Institute of Energy Efficiency and Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Materials, discusses the evolution of photonics and what the future holds for more efficient, higher capacity data centers, which are important for machine learning and data processing. Series: "Institute for Energy Efficiency" [Science] [Show ID: 35159]

Today, the IT Industry accounts for about 2 percent of total greenhouse gas emissions, comparable to the footprint of air travel. Will IT emission eclipse air travel one day soon? Urs Hölzle thinks the clear answer is “no”: he says IT energy will decrease, and perhaps decrease significantly, over the next decade. Find out why. Hölzle is Senior Vice President of Technical Infrastructure & Google Fellow and oversees the design and operation of the servers, networks, and data centers that power Google's services, as well as the development of the software infrastructure used by Google’s applications. Series: "Institute for Energy Efficiency" [Science] [Show ID: 33271]

Darrell Smith speaks of how a small team of engineers at Microsoft were able to turn one of the largest corporate campuses in the world into a "smart campus" by refining the data-driven software to achieve energy and operational savings. Series: "Institute for Energy Efficiency" [Public Affairs] [Science] [Show ID: 29324]

Arun Majumdar discusses a variety of research opportunities and challenges in stationary power and transportation systems that could enable the transition of our energy economy to a sustainable one. Science has shown that our current course of a fossil-based economy is unsustainable. Majumdar explains that the choice that our society is asked to make is often posed as follows: Should we continue our exponential economic growth based on fossil fuels and ignore the environment, or should we reduce our greenhouse gas emissions at the cost of our economic growth? He argues that this is a false choice because it is based on extrapolating the past and does not account for the capacity of research based on science and engineering to create a new industrial revolution for a sustainable energy future. Series: "Institute for Energy Efficiency" [Science] [Show ID: 28475]