Mary Ann Piette
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.
Curriculum Vitae
piette_cv_oct_2022.pdfAwards
Lifetime Achievement Award - November 10th 2022
2022 R&D 100 Award: City Buildings, Energy, and Sustainability (CityBES) Web Tool for Climate Change Strategies - August 22nd 2022
Buildings generate 39% of global CO2 emissions, but evaluating and prioritizing cost-effective technical solutions for individual buildings at city scale poses a significant challenge for city stakeholders. CityBES is a free, powerful modeling and analysis tool that enables quick and quantitative assessments of actionable recommendations for decarbonizing buildings and improving their thermal resilience against extreme weather at the urban scale. CityBES builds upon open city datasets, international data standards, the powerful EnergyPlus simulation engine, a library of mitigation and adaptation measures, and 3D-GIS visualization to inform decision making on city buildings, energy, and sustainability.
2019 R&D 100 Award: Commercial Building Energy Saver - October 30th 2019
The Commercial Building Energy Saver (CBES), a software toolkit that enables equitable access to building deep retrofit and zero-net energy strategies for these buildings, won a 2019 R&D 100 Award in the software/services category.
The development team includes Berkeley Lab researchers Sang Hoon Lee, Xuan Luo, Kaiyu Sun, Tianzhen Hong, Cynthia Regnier, Mary Ann Piette (all pictured left to right), Yixing Chen, Rongpeng Zhang, Sarah C. Taylor-Lange, and Philip Price. The project was supported by the California Energy Commission and the Department of Energy.
2014 ACEEE Champions of Energy Efficiency in Buildings Award - August 20th 2014
Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory received this award from the American Council for and Energy-Efficient Economy "for four decades of leadership on energy efficiency R&D, helping to improve buildings technology and systems in extensive collaboration with industry and states."
GreenBiz.com's VERGE 25 - November 14th 2012
Mary Ann Piette, Head of the Building Technology and Urban Systems Department in EETD, was cited in the category of next-gen buildings for “Setting the research agenda for smart, efficient and connected buildings.”
According to their website, “The VERGE 25 Awards celebrate executives, entrepreneurs, policy makers, thought leaders and others whose organizations and visions are building markets for such things as smarter supply chains, connected vehicles, next-generation buildings and campuses, and smart energy systems.”
Innovative Application of Commercial and Industrial Technology Award - April 16th 2008
For its innovation in the use of technology to substantially improve the performance of its commercial and industrial demand response programs. Members of the development team included Mary Ann Piette, Francis Rubinstein, Sila Kiliccote, and Rish Ghatikar. Read more at Today at Berkeley Lab
Benner Award, National Conference on Building Commissioning - May 4th 2006
For excellence in working to make commissioning "business as usual."