Kerl is Keccak I.E. SHA-3, the international NSA standard. They called it Kerl for fun in homage of Curl, which is still under active development with the absolute world-leading cryptographers of lightweight cryptography. Curl had to be invented to push LIGHTWEIGHT cryptography which is necessary for the Internet of Things. It's quite astonishing how much misinformation is spread around.
SHA-3 is not an NSA standard. It was invented by Guido Bertoni, Joan Daemen, Michaël Peeters and Gilles Van Assche who are researchers at various companies/universities and are from Italy and Belgium.
I am very curious about what 'LIGHTWEIGHT' cryptography is
defined as. I am also dubious about anyone that claims to have 'absolute world-leading cryptographers' since many strong cryptographers are quietly employed by intelligence agencies and most others are academics.
Also, since we are being pedantic, SHA-3/Keccak is an NIST standard, which is a federal agency of the United States.
I'm not an expert in the field, but there certainly have been efforts here and there to make "lightweight" crypto that needs little computational resources (and therefore battery power). One example would be KASUMI[0].