Berkeley Lab Team Wins DOE Sustainability Award

September 7, 2021

Berkeley Lab’s ISO 50001 implementation team has received a 2021 U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Sustainability Award in the Innovative Approach to Sustainability category. The award was announced August 19 at a virtual awards ceremony during the annual Energy Facility Contractors Group, Sustainability, and Environmental Sub-Group meeting.

This is the second year in a row that Berkeley Lab has been honored by the DOE for the lab's commitment to ensuring the department's continued success as a federal leader in sustainability.

Berkeley Lab implemented an ISO 50001 Energy Management System standard aligning to the international gold standard for managing an organization’s energy performance as a way to ensure that its energy and water management activities and efficiency savings are strategic, holistic, effective, and persistent. The Lab attained DOE 50001 Ready recognition in June 2020 and was certified to ISO 50001 in September 2020. It is currently the only ISO 50001 certified DOE lab.

The honorees from Berkeley Lab for this year’s award are:

Sustainability Berkeley Lab: Deirdre Carter, John Elliott, Kushal Malvania, Karen Salvini, Chris Weyandt
Energy Technologies Area: Jingjing Liu, Bunmi Adesola
National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC): Norman Bourassa
Environment, Health, and Safety: Lily Baldwin
Operations: John Chernowski

Top row, left to right: Karen Salvini, John Elliott, Diedre Carter, Chris Weyandt, and Norm Bourassa. Bottom row, left to right: Lily Baldwin, Kushal Malvania, John Chernowski, Jingjing Liu, and Bunmi Adersola.

“This multi-year certification effort is a significant accomplishment and a great model for other sites,” said Elliott, Berkeley Lab’s chief sustainability officer.

In 2020, Berkeley Lab received a DOE Sustainability Award in the category of "Sustainable High Performance Computing/Data Center" for generating significant savings at NERSC through the work of the lab’s cross-division continual improvement team. In FY2021, the NERSC facility maintained a Power Usage Effectiveness rating of 1.08, on par with the most efficient data centers in the world. In addition, NERSC’s newest supercomputer, Perlmutter, was recognized as the 6th most energy-efficient system in the world on the June 2021 Green 500 list.

About Computing Sciences at Berkeley Lab

High performance computing plays a critical role in scientific discovery. Researchers increasingly rely on advances in computer science, mathematics, computational science, data science, and large-scale computing and networking to increase our understanding of ourselves, our planet, and our universe. Berkeley Lab’s Computing Sciences Area researches, develops, and deploys new foundations, tools, and technologies to meet these needs and to advance research across a broad range of scientific disciplines.