UC Davis's Energy Efficiency Center Makes Conservation Sexy

Enlarge

Photograph by Jamie Kripke

---

Related Content

related link

Infographic: Energy Stars

Chevron -- California's biggest company -- is a major sponsor of the EEC, giving money and time in exchange for first-look access to new products and applications. On the desk of Chevron CTO John McDonald is a UC Davis -- designed prototype LED lamp that burns just 5 watts. Some new EEC technologies, like the lamp, will be used inside the company; others will go to Chevron Energy Solutions, a subsidiary that does efficiency retrofits, mostly for public clients. "I think what Davis is doing is unique in a couple of areas," McDonald says. "Its strong focus on commercialization resonates with us from a business perspective."

Bringing companies such as Chevron closer to the classroom helps Davis students and professors design better products from the outset -- and efficiency itself isn't always the best selling point. "Compact fluorescents are a global good, but at the individual level, the savings are like one latte -- just not that compelling," Hargadon says. "And so, one of the challenges with energy efficiency is not technological but entrepreneurial." Michael Siminovitch, a design professor and director of Davis's California Lighting Technology Center, a close partner of the EEC, agrees. "At the end of the day," he says, "what you need to do is show there are other values: lighting quality, vision enhancement, safety, less maintenance, actually enhancing the quality of life."

Sometimes this is about aesthetics, like a class, sponsored last year by Samsung and this year by OSRAM Opto Semiconductors, where student create beautiful atmospheric lighting using LEDs. Other times, it's about utility. One of the Lighting Technology Center's most successful designs, which has been installed on the UC Davis campus, is an LED light that's available in two forms: as bollards, the R2D2-like objects that line public pathways, and as overhead fixtures for parking garages. Cheap sensors make the LEDs "boink" up from 50% to 100% when something comes close to it. This saves energy while improving visibility -- a light turning on is more noticeable than one that has been on all along -- and security, alerting you if someone else is moving near the path or around the garage.

But the majority of parking garages -- the majority of buildings -- all over the country leave their lights on all night as a matter of course. Getting people to flick the switch, or install the sensor that will do it for them, isn't just a design or marketing problem, it's a policy problem. That's why Hargadon hopes the EEC will become a lab for national policies as well as better lightbulbs.

The EEC works closely with the California Public Utilities Commission. Most utilities make more money the more power they sell. The CPUC was the first state utilities commission to break that perverse link, so that saving energy is in a utility's business interest. Electricity bills in the state are set at a flat rate regardless of the amount of power used; plus, the utilities must invest $1 billion annually in efficiency, making them good customers for the technologies coming out of places like the EEC. These pioneering measures are behind the "California miracle": Since they were enacted during the 1970s energy crisis, per capita electricity use in California has remained flat, now standing at 60% of the national figure. Art Rosenfeld, the architect of that policy, called "decoupling," now sits on the EEC's board.

Can these successes be repeated on a national level? President Obama has hit a lot of the right ideas, including smart meters and energy retrofits for 1 million homes a year. Some $20 billion in the stimulus bill will go to programs, such as improving the efficiency of government buildings and the homes of poor people, and to research.

But Hargadon says the feds need a more nuanced understanding of what exactly to fund, and how: "A lot of companies are pushing technologies that are already part of their repertoire, and labs are pushing for more dollars to continue to advance research. But a lot of stuff on the shelf hasn't been picked up or designed into a business effectively. So we'll either be going with 30-year-old technology or funding technology that won't have an impact for 20 years. My hope is that we can move research out of labs in the next three to five years." Hargadon, and Davis, are providing a model of how to do just that.