Overview

Improvements in energy efficiency offer the greatest potential to help meet our immediate and near-term energy needs while the U.S. concurrently develops long-term renewable energy resources. In 2008, McKinsey & Company performed an exhaustive review of the potential of energy efficiency in the U.S. economy and concluded that energy efficiency is currently the lowest cost energy opportunity to reduce consumption in our economy. Thus, a major challenge is to develop mechanisms to create a cultural transformation where society has the knowledge and tools to make energy efficiency a consideration in everything it does.

The lighting of our built environment consumes 8.3 percent of U.S. primary energy, or 22 percent of all electricity generated in the U.S. ASU has considerable strength in a very promising new area of lighting research—solid state lighting. Increasingly, research is focusing on user/behavioral interaction with energy efficient technology. ASU has considerable strength in using behavioral mechanisms to assess such activities.