LBNL Resilient Cooling Workshop 2022

Now available: Findings from our April 2022 workshop

In less than 20 years, millions of people in the United States could be exposed to dangerous “off-the-charts” outdoor air temperatures of 127 °F (53 °C) or more due to rapid climate change. In 60 years over one-third of the population could be exposed to such conditions, posing unprecedented health and economic risks. There is an urgent need for a new focus on scientific development to support resilient adaptation to and mitigation of increasingly frequent extreme-heat events in our communities. We expect that multiple U.S. government agencies will join to formulate short-, mid-, and long-term strategies to battle this challenge nationally and globally.

Advanced materials, technologies, and practices for resilient cooling of homes, commercial buildings, and outdoor spaces are key to keeping occupants cooler, healthier, and safer in heat waves. With its strengths in building technology development, performance assessment, and economic analysis, including multiple ongoing projects to promote resilient cooling in California and the United States, and its ties to public health departments and disadvantaged communities, Berkeley Lab’s Energy Technologies Area is well-situated to lead a national effort to address the issue of extreme heat. We propose to convene a closed-doored invited workshop to properly frame the challenges that we face and contemplate solutions.

The workshop seeks to:

• Establish thought leadership

• Develop a broad R&D agenda defining the scale of the problem

• Identify key solutions spanning low TRL (science) to high TRL (near-term deployment)

• Write a perspectives paper outlining the problems and proposed solutions (e.g., Wagner et al. 2021)