Mary Ann Piette
Mary Ann Piette
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Mary Ann Piette is the Associate Lab Director of the Energy Technologies Area (ETA) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. This area includes the Building Technology & Urban Systems (BTUS), Energy Analysis & Environmental Impacts, and Energy Storage & Distributed Resources divisions. She manages a research enterprise comprised of about 700 staff and affiliates, including 120 principal investigators working across a broad set of technology R&D programs to accelerate decarbonization ranging from demand-side energy efficiency and grid integration to hydrogen technologies, energy storage, and renewable energy systems. Piette facilitates collaboration with partners including manufacturers, utilities, state agencies, cities, aggregators, non-profits, engineering firms, building owners, and many others. She has also helped shape Berkeley Lab’s culture to support inclusion, diversity. equity and accountability. As a Senior Scientist her personal research interests include new building technologies, modeling, and analysis; commercial and residential building systems integration; grid interactive communications and integration with electric vehicles, energy storage, and photovoltaics. She has over 10 years of experience supporting building technology workforce programs, and her recent work explores how to accelerate decarbonization while ensuring equity and affordability. Piette leads the new California Load Flexibility Research and Deployment Hub (CalFlexHub) pioneering new technologies, and advanced communication and controls to enable buildings and EVs to receive automated dynamic pricing and GHG signals. She has been a visiting researcher at both the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization in Newcastle, Australia and the Chalmers University of Technology, Department of Building Services Engineering in Gothenburg, Sweden. Piette has authored over 115 peer reviewed publications related to energy systems, and she recently won a Lifetime Achievement Award at Berkeley Lab for her work in energy-efficient and grid-interactive buildings research. As part of energy modeling teams at Berkeley Lab, she has received two R&D 100 awards for the tools to evaluate commercial building and city-level energy efficiency and decarbonization strategies. She is a board member of the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy where she chairs the Research Advisory Board. She is also on the Board of the OpenADR Alliance. Piette has an MS in Mechanical Engineering from UC Berkeley and a Licentiate in Building Services Engineering from the Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden.
All Sessions by Mary Ann Piette
Grid-interactive Efficient Buildings
Grid-interactive efficient buildings (GEB) are changing the historic relationship between the electric utility and the buildings they serve. Today, utilities face unprecedented challenges -and opportunities – to modernize their infrastructure, eliminate carbon emissions, and remain reliable and resilient, and affordable in their energy services. Creating a smarter and more dynamic two-way communication environment with their customers offers a smart approach to building the 21st century electric utility. GEBs deploy smart technology that allow building operators to shed, shift, and modulate their building loads in response to electric grid reliability, price signals, and operational needs. This will be ever more important as electric vehicle charging becomes more common. Building owners can optimize their operations and their energy costs especially in the emerging trend toward dynamic pricing structures for electricity. This session will bring together expertise from both the utility and the building owner/manager perspective to talk about the value streams inherent in GEBs.