Behind the scenes with R&D 100’s top technician of 2024

A senior scientific engineering associate at Berkeley Lab, Howdy Goudey was named the R&D 100 Technician of the Year Award winner for his pioneering work in building energy efficiency and window technologies. During his thirty years at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Goudey’s work has proven instrumental in developing sustainable building technologies, such as vacuum-insulated windows and automated thermal testing systems, that are influencing national standards.

Goudey’s journey at Berkeley Lab began while he was still an engineering physics student in college. What started as a student position testing window thermal properties evolved into a decades-long commitment to advancing energy efficiency. “I started at the lab as a student assistant when I was still attending UC Berkeley Engineering,” Goudey recalls. “I was very interested in energy efficiency, so I started working in the Windows Lab, where they were doing thermal heat transfer experiments.”

What does this recognition mean to you, personally and professionally?

Goudey: It’s a nice honor, and I appreciate my colleagues nominating me for it. It was a surprise—I didn’t expect it. I was always familiar with the R&D 100 awards and even received one for work I did over 20 years ago.

How did your journey in energy efficiency research begin?

Goudey: I started at the lab as a student assistant while attending UC Berkeley Engineering, working in the Windows Lab on thermal heat transfer experiments. We conducted physical experiments to validate modeling software used in the industry’s window energy rating system, with LBNL providing both technical support for the software and thermal measurements. I’ve been in the same group for 30 years, though the work has varied significantly.

Can you say more about your research on windows?

Goudey: I helped with other research in our general area of windows and daylighting, but it wasn’t in my direct thermal lab. Some other researchers did a lot of work with daylighting and electrochromic windows, which change their transmission or tint with an applied voltage—kind of like photochromic glasses that tint when you go out in the sun. They’re responding to light, but you can use the same sort of materials and manipulate them by applying a voltage instead of light. We did a lot of work with electrochromics and supporting that, and just developing and testing high-performance windows in general, trying to reduce energy use associated with windows.

Well, a lot of that is the technology or the performance of the product itself, but it’s also how you use it. A window isn’t really the kind of simple thing where you just put in more insulation and you have less heat flow. You’re balancing heat transfer, solar heat gain—solar energy coming through the window—and visible light, because people want windows to be able to see through. So there’s trade-offs between these different performance parameters. Actually determining what the best window is for a particular situation is a lot more complicated than just saying, “Oh, have a more insulating window.” You need to figure out: Do you want passive solar energy? Do you want lots of daylighting? Are you going to get glare? All these other characteristics.

That’s where it gets into whole-building annual energy modeling. EnergyPlus is a modeling tool that’s used to incorporate real weather data and detailed models of buildings to generate an annual energy balance—it’s really like every 10-minute energy balance on the building. With that kind of detailed modeling, you can look at some of the nuances of what windows make sense in a particular climate or orientation, or all those types of things. So we get into that as well—not just building better windows and testing them, but also using the tools to show what’s appropriate in what situations and how to improve thermal comfort and things like that.

One of your early successes was with gas-filled panel insulation. Can you tell us about that project?

Goudey: Early on, we prototyped and got a patent on an alternative high-performance thermal insulation that was an outgrowth of window technology, but it wasn’t a see-through product—it was just an opaque insulation. I did a lot of work prototyping that in different applications. We did a project to insulate a car with the auto industry; it was a program called Partnership for Next Generation Vehicles. This was around 1999. That was early work showing that if you insulated a car, you could reduce the thermal loads by 75–80% because there was so little work done to mitigate heat transfer in cars. They just throw a big heater and a big air conditioner at it and don’t really worry about the thermal envelope of the car.

We also prototyped that insulation in temporary uses like perishable shipping containers and building insulation. That was nice as an early career project—to be doing something with a new technology that had just been patented, and we were helping prototype the licensing for different applications. That’s when we got an R&D 100 Award in the early 2000s for gas-filled panel insulation. But that was just one outgrowth of window work, which I’ve continued to do for 20 years.

We’ve done a lot of testing high-performance products and validating them, using infrared thermography—measuring surface temperatures with infrared thermography—and turning that into a quantitative tool where it gives us the most accurate surface temperature we can get out of it.

Your work extends beyond traditional window technology. Could you explain your research on electrochromic windows and other advanced technologies?

Goudey: We’ve done a lot of testing high-performance products and validating them, using infrared thermography—measuring surface temperatures with infrared thermography—and turning that into a quantitative tool where it gives us the most accurate surface temperature we can get out of it.

I helped with other research in our general area of windows and daylighting, but it wasn’t in my direct thermal lab. Some other researchers did a lot of work with daylighting and electrochromic windows, which change their transmission or tint with an applied voltage—kind of like photochromic glasses that tint when you go out in the sun. They’re responding to light, but you can use the same sort of materials and manipulate them by applying a voltage instead of light. We did a lot of work with electrochromics and supporting that, and just developing and testing high-performance windows in general, trying to reduce energy use associated with windows.

Well, a lot of that is the technology or the performance of the product itself, but it’s also how you use it. A window isn’t really the kind of simple thing where you just put in more insulation and you have less heat flow. You’re balancing heat transfer, solar heat gain—solar energy coming through the window—and visible light, because people want windows to be able to see through. So there’s trade-offs between these different performance parameters. Actually determining what the best window is for a particular situation is a lot more complicated than just saying, “Oh, have a more insulating window.” You need to figure out: Do you want passive solar energy? Do you want lots of daylighting? Are you going to get glare? All these other characteristics.

That’s where it gets into whole-building annual energy modeling. EnergyPlus is a modeling tool that’s used to incorporate real weather data and detailed models of buildings to generate an annual energy balance—it’s really like every 10-minute energy balance on the building. With that kind of detailed modeling, you can look at some of the nuances of what windows make sense in a particular climate or orientation, or all those types of things. So we get into that as well—not just building better windows and testing them, but also using the tools to show what’s appropriate in what situations and how to improve thermal comfort and things like that.

Can you say more on your mentorship work?

Goudey: One of the benefits of Lawrence Berkeley Lab’s location—being immediately adjacent to the UC Berkeley campus—is that it’s very easy to recruit students to work at the lab. So I’ve definitely done that over the years. I’ve probably had one or more students that have just worked part-time with me in the lab. I think it’s valuable for students who often have a pretty academic focus to be able to do more hands-on lab work—not only testing but building and prototyping things. That’s some of the opportunities that I’m able to share with a variety of students who have come through, and that’s been a nice part of the work. Sometimes we just get student assistant hires directly, and then the lab has programs that are specific summer internship programs where they have expectations of writing up and presenting their work at the lab as part of that program.

You were part of a team that won the Berkeley Lab Director’s Award for Societal Impact. What is the backstory on that?

Goudey: Some of that work started earlier with Ashok Gadgil, who worked at LBNL in my division, but I wasn’t directly working with him. He later became an adjunct professor at UC Berkeley and was teaching a class on development or technology for developing communities and appropriate technology considerations with cultural, societal, and economic approaches. It wasn’t just a straight engineering class, but the students did a hands-on project where they developed a technology, and many of them traveled to other countries and learned more about deploying it. Some of them got very involved and continued beyond the class itself.

I got involved because a lot of his projects—before this class happened, Ashok had projects. I think one of the first ones was a UV water purification technology. He had all these great projects but had no lab and no facilities to build stuff. I mean, the lab—LBNL as a whole—did, but it was very expensive to use the main engineering shops to build stuff because they were all designed for big physics projects that went on for years. We happened to have our own small-scale fabrication capabilities in our thermal lab, so we were helping him prototype some of the technologies like this UV purification device and later a clean wood cookstove, which became the Darfur Cookstove.

Then, as the class I described came about, I ended up helping mentor a lot of his students, supporting the development of their technologies and prototyping. Eventually, one of the technologies they worked a lot on was this infant warmer, which is basically a blanket with some phase-change material that you can charge up by putting it in hot water—getting it to store a bunch of heat—and then release it gently at a steady temperature to provide the equivalent of what an incubator would provide without having to rely on electricity and other infrastructure.

So that was one of many projects we helped support—mostly Ashok and his students’ work—but I did help a lot with some of the development of those technologies, how to build them, and I did thermal analysis on some of it. Another large one was a vaccine refrigerator that needed to be more robust for situations where there was not reliable power, to avoid problems of over-freezing or underperformance. They’ve been using passive coolers with ice for years, but there was a problem that you could overcool and damage the vaccines. So we developed a vaccine cooler that was more robust and could provide a safer temperature range for the vaccines. There were just a lot of projects like that.

There was another arsenic water quality removal project that we did a lot of work with. So yeah, that was very rewarding work to be able to do. It was never part of my official job description—I was really helping out a researcher in the lab and also mentoring students just kind of as a volunteer but providing resources. I ended up getting pretty involved in doing some design and development work on some of those technologies.

What was it like working with Dr. Ashok Gadgil, the renowned Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory scientist and UC Berkeley professor?

Goudey: It’s been a great experience to be connected with him. I mean, he’s just very prolific and involved in so many different important projects. It’s been a great exposure for me to the technologies and also to the students. Being able to work with those projects has been great, even though, like I said, it hasn’t been a formal part of my job at LBNL. Although for a short time, there was a group called LIGTT—I’ve forgotten what it stands for now—it was a formal research group within the lab doing these types of projects. The infant warmer did end up being under that group for a while, I think. For that time, there were actual accounts to build within the lab for those projects. But, you know, these things started as passion projects for Ashok; it wasn’t part of his official work either. He was doing it with little bits of money that he got from awards or gifts or things that he could get started. He managed to really grow that work from just little things he was doing on the side to a main program within the lab, and then through UC and other researchers at the lab continuing the work on a lot of these things.

Could you also talk about your work outside the lab?

Goudey: I’ve been on [the El Cerrito Environmental Quality Committee] probably for 15-ish years now. More recently—but still probably at least seven or eight years ago—I joined a similar volunteer citizen committee for Contra Costa County. Both committees work on climate action plans and other environmental topics.

We do everything from hands-on work parties and stewardship in natural areas, including pulling invasive plants and planting natives, to policy recommendations about reducing energy use and carbon emissions from city operations. We were really involved in getting a CCA—an alternative source of grid power using more renewables to reduce emissions from electricity use. We’ve also worked on reducing single-use plastics and ordinances around takeout containers. A lot of our work is public outreach through environmental films, workshops on topics from local wildlife to energy savings, and community events like El Cerrito’s Fourth of July Festival where we table to share information.

El Cerrito has this unique 100-acre hillside natural area within the city limits. While we have the East Bay Regional Parks along the ridge from Richmond to Hayward, the Hillside Natural Area is special—it’s surrounded by houses but remains a large natural open space. We’ve done extensive maintenance work there, including removing invasive French broom.”

What are some things you’re excited about, either in your current role or outside?

Goudey: I’ve always been interested in reducing energy use or alternative energy. So that has also turned into carbon emission reductions. I’m interested in the electrification transition away from fossil fuels and trying to support getting our space and water heating done with electricity instead of gas, as well as transportation. So yeah, that general decarbonization and electrification of things has been a recent interest, both within the lab and outside of it.

The amount of waste heat in our traditional thermal conversion cycles has always been a significant issue. At the 2001 R&D 100 Awards—which was right after 9/11, in October when flights were just resuming—I remember seeing heat pump water heaters presented. As someone in energy efficiency, I didn’t fully appreciate the technology’s potential at the time.

Nowadays, I’m very interested in heat pumps. I’ve had a heat pump water heater for 10 years. So it’s like some of this comes full circle, where you actually see something go from being a new technology getting developed and getting awards to seeing really wide deployment through some of the same research and programs that I am involved with at the lab and also outside in some of these areas where we’re helping try to push decarbonization. It is fun to have seen that go from that stage to later on. But also, it made me think that I didn’t have the foresight to really see where it was going at the time. And then, you know, our technology that we got an award for at the time actually didn’t get deployed nearly as widely in the end or adopted in a widespread way, which is not uncommon for new technologies. But it just gives you some perspective on these things—what you think is important at the time and what ends up really making a difference over time can be different than you think.