NEWS Berkeley Science Review profileDecember 2, 2021

Dr. Daniel Kam­men has had a long and illus­tri­ous career defined by his com­mit­ment to expand­ing clean ener­gy world­wide. He orig­i­nal­ly became inter­est­ed in clean ener­gy as a post­doc work­ing on wind and solar projects in Nicaragua and El Sal­vador in the mid-1980s. His research led to a fac­ul­ty posi­tion at Prince­ton until 1999, when he joined UC Berke­ley. Here, he found­ed and leads the Renew­able and Appro­pri­ate Ener­gy Lab­o­ra­to­ry (RAEL), whose work includes iden­ti­fy­ing nov­el mate­ri­als for solar pan­els and bat­ter­ies, build­ing com­pu­ta­tion­al mod­els of region­al ener­gy sys­tems to iden­ti­fy oppor­tu­ni­ties for renew­able ener­gy, and imple­ment­ing ener­gy policy.

Although RAEL’s research has result­ed in hun­dreds of aca­d­e­m­ic papers, Kam­men cares deeply about hav­ing a real-world impact. He is par­tic­u­lar­ly proud of RAEL’s projects in Africa, as they not only address cli­mate change but also increase peo­ples’ access to ener­gy. One project installs mini solar grids in war-torn areas like South Sudan and the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Repub­lic of Con­go. These instal­la­tions pro­vide renew­able ener­gy to pow­er crit­i­cal infra­struc­ture, like health clin­ics and women’s cen­ters. What start­ed out as an aca­d­e­m­ic exer­cise in his lab is now a way for com­pa­nies to buy Peace Renew­able Ener­gy Cred­its, an inter­na­tion­al­ly trad­ed vir­tu­al com­mod­i­ty that pro­vides a rev­enue stream for devel­op­ers of renew­able ener­gy projects and offers com­pa­nies a way to finance impact­ful projects in these coun­tries. Out­side of Africa, RAEL’s oth­er projects include elec­tri­fy­ing 30 thou­sand taxis in Chi­na, defeat­ing a large coal project in Malaysian Bor­neo, and using Google data from 60 mil­lion rooftops to show the mas­sive amount of social inequal­i­ty in solar pan­el usage.

When Kam­men isn’t help­ing com­mu­ni­ties around the world tran­si­tion to clean ener­gy, he’s star­ing out into space. He says, “I have some pret­ty cool tele­scopes. I do a lot of deep space pho­tog­ra­phy, look­ing at exo­plan­ets and plan­ets around oth­er stars.” Clear­ly Kam­men cares about plan­ets, whether it’s dis­cov­er­ing new ones or sav­ing ours.

For the orig­i­nal: click here.

Or:

https://​berke​ley​sciencere​view​.com/​a​r​t​i​c​l​e​/​2​0​2​1​/​1​1​/​3​0​/​f​a​c​u​l​t​y​-​p​r​o​f​i​l​e​-​d​a​n​i​e​l​-​k​a​m​men