Decarbonizing Buildings
Daniel Kammen, Professor
Energy and Resources
Closed. This professor is continuing with Spring 2024 apprentices on this project; no new apprentices needed for Fall 2024.
California has committed to fully eliminate carbon pollution from electricity by the year 2045, by passing landmark state bill SB100. Alongside, several bills have been passed to move towards deep emissions reduction in all sectors, including buildings and transport. Decarbonizing existing buildings (around 13 million residential homes along with large segment of commercial buildings combust natural gas for water and space heating) is expensive and difficult to mandate. Today high efficiency electric heat pumps exist that can leverage steadily ‘greening’ electricity to decarbonize the building sector. However, there are several potential challenges in switching from fossil fuel to ‘clean electricity’ such as (i) high up front cost, (ii) the impact on the grid due to the increased electricity demand. In this study, we want to address some of the questions with a detailed modeling effort.
Role: You will work on all aspects of the project: data collection; building comparison; and model building to forecast performance in California's different climate zones.
Qualifications: We are looking for students with proficiency in python and an interest in economics of clean technologies.
Day-to-day supervisor for this project: Dr. Shuba Raghavan
Hours: to be negotiated
Related website: http://rael.berkeley.edu
Engineering, Design & Technologies Environmental Issues