Special Seminar: Resource Demand and Supply Chain Drivers in Concrete Production
Wednesday August 5th, 2026 / 1pm PDT
Sabbie Miller, Faculty Director, Materials Decarbonization and Sustainability Center
Societal demand for concrete is enormous, with estimates suggesting it is the most widely consumed engineered material in the world. Meeting this demand requires substantial natural resources, including minerals, water used both in the concrete itself and throughout its supply chain, and significant energy inputs. In this webinar, we examine the major drivers of resource consumption and losses across the concrete value chain. We also discuss opportunities to improve resource circularity and provide context for viable alternative materials that can partially replace conventional concrete constituents at scale.
Field Testing Results for a Ventilation Controller That Knows What’s in the Air
Researchers at UC Davis field-tested a novel ventilation controller designed to do two things at once: reduce HVAC energy use and improve indoor air quality.
Typical ventilation controllers are programmed only for energy savings. For example, a demand-control ventilation system with economizer cooling will pull in outdoor air whenever it’s cool enough to give the compressor a break—but it has no idea what’s in that air. On a smoky day, the system will do its job and lower indoor temperatures while filling the building with PM2.5 from wildfire smoke. Traditional controllers simply can’t tell the difference.
The new rule-based controller can. Instead of running at fixed rates, it adjusts ventilation in response to both indoor and outdoor conditions—balancing CO2 buildup, infectious aerosols, and outdoor air pollution in real time.
Western Cooling Efficiency Center (WCEC) presents its field-testing findings in Science and Technology for the Built Environment.
Indoor Lighting that Addresses Human Centric Needs
CLTC is setting up the Human Centric Lab in preparation for a revolutionary indoor lighting system. Because standard indoor lighting remains largely static, it disrupts our natural circadian rhythms—a major hidden contributor to both physical and mental fatigue. This issue is especially critical given that people spend roughly 90% of their time indoors. To address this problem, CLTC—in partnership with Ministry of Trade, Industry and Resources, Korea Photonics Technology Institute, and Maltani Lighting—is evaluating adaptive indoor lighting that mimics natural daylight cycles to support human well-being, continuing the center’s long-standing dedication to lighting for health.
No Chiller, No Water, No Problem: A New Way to Cool AI’s Hottest Chips
AI is pushing chips to run hotter than ever. Next-generation GPUs are expected to dissipate 2,000 watts each—roughly the heat of a space heater, concentrated on a chip smaller than your palm. Traditional air cooling can’t keep up, and the usual backup plan, compressor-based chillers, adds substantially to a data center’s energy bill. Evaporative cooling saves energy, but at the price of deepening a data center’s water footprint.
Researchers at UC Davis’s Western Cooling Efficiency Center (WCEC) have designed a modular data center for AI computing that packs 1.5 megawatts of computing power into the volume of a standard 40-foot shipping container—and keeps it cool without energy-intensive compressor-based systems. Better still, the sealed-loop design rejects heat directly to the air, consuming no water at all.
The system pulls heat directly off the chips using a custom copper cold plate built from thousands of microscopic pins—3D-printed using electrochemical additive manufacturing—and rejects it to the outside air through a novel WCEC-designed microchannel polymer heat exchanger (MPHX).
To prove the concept, WCEC built and tested lab scale MPHX prototypes, where measured heat transfer deviated from model predictions by just 5.7% on average in the relevant operating range. System-level modeling built on these validated components shows the design keeps GPUs at safe temperatures even on a 104 °F day, with cooling consuming just 2% of the computing power—and under 1% in best-case scenarios.
Read more in ASME’s Journal of Electronic Packaging.
Field Demonstration of an Emerging Dehumidification Technology for Indoor Farms
WCEC researchers are currently conducting a study on an energy-efficient dehumidification technology installed at an indoor container farm growing lettuce, funded by the California statewide emerging technology program, CalNEXT (calnext.org). Indoor farms have high dehumidification requirements, and typical HVAC solutions are energy intensive. This study is a side-by-side, real-world demonstration of the novel technology relative to a conventional approach.
On May 29, 2026, WCEC researchers led a tour of the farm and the retrofit HVAC system for utility stakeholders and our CalNEXT partners. The indoor farm owner and operator gave participants an in-depth understanding of the farm itself, and WCEC researchers described the new HVAC system and showed how it works. WCEC researchers also presented preliminary results from the study; over nine months of operation, the retrofit HVAC system provided average daily energy savings of about 40% relative to the conventional equipment.
Explore How Emerging Technologies and Utility Programs can Contribute to California’s Energy Efficiency Goals
The CalNEXT Innovation Nexus is our inaugural in-person event. The event will create a space to explore how emerging technologies and utility programs can contribute to California’s energy efficiency goals. We will present CalNEXT project findings and connect research to potential outcomes for developing and utilizing new technologies.
Catch Up on Recent Events and Seminars Online
If you couldn’t join us for our Industry & Materials Decarbonization Symposium, Emerging Energy Professionals Seminar, Materials Decarbonization, or Demand Flex events, you can now watch them online. Catch up on this and other recent events and seminars anytime!