The California Institute for Energy and Environment (CIEE) is pleased to announce Aoyu Zou as the 2025 Art Rosenfeld Award for Energy Efficiency winner!
Zou is currently a third-year PhD student at UC Berkeley’s Center for the Built Environment (CBE), where his research tackles the challenge of matching building heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) operations with renewable energy generation from the grid. With a background in civil engineering, Zou pursued a Master of Philosophy in Architecture and Urban Studies at the University of Cambridge with an interest in passive design strategies and climate-responsive building designs. After witnessing the exacerbation of energy inefficiencies during the COVID-19 pandemic, he developed a keen interest in addressing these systemic issues through data-driven and policy-informed approaches. This led him to pursue the Master of Science in Systems Engineering program at UC Berkeley, where he collaborated with his colleagues to construct a reinforcement learning model that integrated electric vehicle (EV) charging, electricity demand, and utility cost structures to optimize building energy costs.
Under the supervision of Professors Stefano Schiavon and Gail Brager, Zou’s current work specifically focuses on developing a streamlined process for early-stage commissioning of control retrofits to establish a standardized framework that can be generalized across diverse building types. Zou works on simplifying building control logic retrofits by standardizing the digital naming of the sensors and actuators that enable control. Zou is also working to develop a new measurement and verification (M&V) method more suitable for most control applications. The team has presented the proposed M&V framework to the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating, and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) guideline committee. With the support of the Art Rosenfeld Award, Zou will be able to conduct rigorous field experiments and fine tune his framework based on the needs of practitioners across the industry, including building operators, policymakers, and energy consultants.
“It is absolutely an honor to be the recipient of this prestigious award,” said Zou “Dr. Rosenfeld’s groundbreaking and visionary work, as well as his lifelong dedication to energy research have profoundly reshaped how society approaches energy efficiency and sustainability.”
“Being recognized with this award is a reminder that as I continue my work, it is important to focus on tangible outcomes that truly benefit our communities,” he continued. “With the support of the Art Rosenfeld Award, I will continue my research in developing practical, scalable grid-interactive solutions that enable other practitioners to improve energy efficiency in our built environment.”
The Art Rosenfeld Award for Energy Efficiency was established and continues to be supported by Art Rosenfeld’s friends, colleagues, and admirers, with Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) as a corporate sponsor. The award is administered by CIEE to promote student research on policy and/or technology that can enable more efficient use of energy.