The recent energy crisis in California has led us to investigate the high power RF systems at the Advanced Light Source (ALS) in order to decrease the energy consumption and power costs. We found the Storage Ring Klystron Power Amplifier system operating as designed but with significant power waste. A simple proportional-integrator (PI) analog loop, which controls the klystron collector beam current, as a function of the output RF power, has been designed and installed. The design considerations, besides efficiency improvement, were to interface to the existing system without major expense. They were to also avoid the klystron cathode power supply filter's resonance in the loop's dynamics, and prevent a conflict with the existing Cavity RF Amplitude Loop dynamics. This efficiency loop will allow us to save up to 700 MW-hours of electrical energy per year and increase the lifetime of the klystron.

The ALS storage ring 500 MHz RF system uses two re-entrant accelerating cavities powered by a single 320kW PHILLIPS YK1305 klystron. During several years of initial operation, the RF cavities were not equipped with effective passive HOM damper systems. Longitudinal beam stability was achieved through cavity temperature control and the longitudinal feedback system (LFB), which was often operating at the edge of its capabilities. As a result, longitudinal beam stability was a significant operations issue at the ALS. During two consecutive shutdown periods (April 2002 and 2003) we installed E-type HOM dampers on the main and third harmonic cavities. These devices dramatically decreased the Q-values of the longitudinal anti-symmetric HOM modes. The next step is to damp the rest of the longitudinal HOM modes in the main cavities below the synchrotron radiation damping level. This will hopefully eliminate the need for the LFB and set the stage for a possible increase in beam current. The "waveguide" type of HOM damper was the only option that didn't significantly compromise the vacuum performance of the RF cavity. The design process and the results of the low level measurements of the new waveguide dampers are presented in this paper.

ALS top-off mode of operation will require injection of the electron beam from the Booster Ring into the Storage Ring at the full ALS energy level of 1.9 GeV. Currently the Booster delivers a beam at 1.5 GeV to the Storage Ring where it is then ramped to the full energy and stored for the user operation. The higher Booster beam energy will require the pulse magnets in the Booster and Storage Rings to operate at proportionally higher magnetic gap fields. Our group studied and tested the possible design and installation modifications required to operate the magnets and drivers at "top-off" levels. Our results and experiments show that with minor electrical modifications all the existing pulse magnet systems can be used at the higher energy levels, and the increased operational stresses should have a negligible impact on magnet reliability. Furthermore, simple electrical modifications to the storage ring thick septum will greatly reduce the present level of septum stray leakage fields into the storage ring beam.