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Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.
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This document is a supplement to the Better Plants’ Renewable Energy Guidance for Industry 2021. The purpose of this document is to further explain renewable energy technologies (i.e., solar energy, wind energy, biogas, waterpower, and geothermal) and to discuss briefly fuel cells and hybrid renewable energy systems.
The US buildings sector faces a confluence of challenges, including a clear necessity to decarbonize the built environment to mitigate climate change, a need for greater resilience in the face of more frequent extreme weather events, a dearth of affordable housing, and flat or declining construction productivity that hinders the sector’s ability to adapt. Better data and guidance on new and existing residential buildings can outline paths forward for the market. These can help clarify stakeholder priorities and highlight applications for new (or newly relevant) technologies and approaches that have the potential to break traditional barriers, bridge technical gaps, reduce costs, create added value, and enable decarbonization of the national residential building stock. Decarbonizing the national building stock before 2050 will require massive increases in zero-carbon retrofits and new construction in this decade. By 2030, whole-home retrofit activity must increase several fold, and virtually all new construction will need to be zero carbon. It is difficult to imagine achieving this transformation without substantial changes in how buildings are constructed and retrofitted.
Congress directed that the US Department of Energy (DOE) initiate a review of interconnection rules to identify barriers to interconnection and ways to better integrate combined heat and power (CHP) and waste heat to power (WHP) in the electric grid. Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) supports DOE by providing technical assistance for CHP. DOE tasked ORNL with the interconnection review and development of model guidance to enable developers and CHP owners to interconnect more CHP. This report summarizes the work that DOE initiated in response to the congressional request.
Recognizing the scale of this industry challenge, the United States (U.S.) Department of Energy (DOE) Grid Deployment Office (GDO) and Cybersecurity Energy Security & Emergency Response office have launched a multi-year BESS supply chain security initiative to identify consequence-driven approaches to addressing BESS supply chain security and provide resources to support prioritization of supply chain security efforts associated with the procurement of BESS equipment and services. This guide is one element of the supporting resources to be provided and sets forth a framework and guidance for procurement bidding, selection, risk analysis, and agreements stakeholders can implement to mitigate cybersecurity risks across the entirety of battery system component ecosystem, including the interconnected software and hardware required for control and monitoring BESSs.
The Eastern Interconnection Situational Awareness Monitoring System (ESAMS) project demonstrated the feasibility of aggregating synchrophasor measurements from across an interconnection, analyzing them, and providing real-time wide-area situational awareness to system operators who may have excellent visibility within their footprint but lack an interconnection-wide view. An application within ESAMS that has garnered industry interest involves detecting forced oscillations visible across multiple areas, identifying the region where the oscillation originated from, quantifying the uncertainty in source localization results, and notifying users in real-time if the detected oscillation amplitudes cross a specified threshold. It is expected that system operators will utilize their internal SCADA/EMS/synchrophasor systems in conjunction with information provided by ESAMS to take effective mitigation actions if forced oscillation notifications are received. This report provides some general guidance on how the ESAMS information can be used for source localization and coordination among multiple reliability coordinators; and also identifies potential enhancements to ESAMS notifications for improved interpretability.
Federal Guidance Report No. 15 (FGR 15), External Exposure to Radionuclides in Air, Water and Soil, published in 2019 and referred to below as FGR 2019, provides age-specific effective dose rate coefficients for reference persons externally exposed to each of 1252 radionuclides homogenously distributed in environmental media. Soon after completion of FGR 2019, the International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP) published a similar report (ICRP Publication 144, 2020) addressing the same radionuclides and many of the external exposure scenarios addressed in FGR 2019. In 2023 Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) published a review of dose coefficients in FGR 2019, concluding that “The external effective dose from beta radiation is not appropriately accounted for in FGR 15 for both low- and high-energy beta emitters in air, in soil, and on soil surfaces.” That conclusion was based largely on comparisons of dose coefficients in FGR 2019 with values in ICRP Publication 144 but also on consideration of some unexpected patterns of equivalent dose rate coefficients across tissues and of effective dose rate coefficients across different soil depths, for a selected set of low-energy beta emitters. In response to the ANL report, the Center for Radiation Protection Knowledge (CRPK) at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) performed an extensive reexamination of the methods and published values of FGR 2019. CRPK found that coding errors had resulted in inaccurate estimates, primarily overestimates, in many of the dose coefficients tabulated in FGR 2019 but that many of the differences between results in FGR 2019 and ICRP Publication 144 could be traced to differences in methodology. CRPK has corrected all errors in FGR 2019 associated with the coding errors and has taken the opportunity to improve a major portion of the remaining dose coefficients in FGR 2019, primarily through additional Monte Carlo calculations resulting in improved statistics for tissue equivalent dose rate coefficients for exposure to monoenergetic sources. This has eliminated the need for extrapolation of results from high and medium energies to low energies, as was done in FGR 2019. In addition, inconsistencies in the methodology identified in the review, such as computational representation of the adult female, were eliminated. The revised effective dose rate coefficients are consistent with values in ICRP Publication 144 except for differences in values clearly arising from differences in methodology; and differences in values for a relatively small set of very low-energy radionuclides with highly uncertain dose coefficients regardless of methodology.
This final technical report summarizes research, case studies, and resources developed from 2020–2025 on prefabricated construction and remote virtual inspections. It documents key findings on benefits, challenges, and best practices, highlights examples from multiple states, and provides guidance to support wider adoption of these innovations in the construction sector.
With the rapid development of advanced reactors and numerous companies requesting pre-application engagements with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), there is need for the NRC to best prepare themselves for new challenges presented by advanced technologies. One specific reactor type of interest is the molten salt reactor (MSR) that uses liquid salt as the fuel for the reactor. Liquid salt fuel reactors have specific challenges with regards to performing material control and accounting (MC&A). The challenges result from the fuel form being a continuous fissile material form rather than discrete units like is found with fuel assemblies in traditional light water reactors (LWRs). The goal of this document is to provide the NRC with guidance on the different approaches and technologies that may be proposed by reactor designers to address these problems to prepare staff for regulatory reviews.
Building sciences and technology directly impact human health, productivity, and resource consumption (e.g., energy and critical minerals). Addressing emerging challenges in this field requires skilled building science professionals. JUMP into STEM sought to inspire the next generation of building scientists through a real-world competition that introduced participants to the field and connected them with national laboratory and industry professionals. This report highlights select challenges from past competitions which are tailored for academic and industry professionals who aim to develop or recruit multidisciplinary talent. It also includes additional guidance to support the effective replication of these challenges.
This is a guidance document of how to request an exemption from Standard Compliance (SC) under the US DOE's Energy Policy Act (EPAct).
The Federal Metering Guidance documents the metering provisions in EO 13834, Efficient Federal Operations and other metering related statutory requirements. This document provides the meter-related reporting requirements for Federal agencies, specifies a method to verify the existence of currently installed building-level meters, provides guidelines on prioritizing the implementation of advanced energy and water meters, sets the schedule for agencies to update their five-year metering plans, provides the minimum requirements that agencies must meet when updating their five-year metering plans along with recommend elements for an effective plan.
This document addresses the use of passive vents as a source of outdoor air in multifamily buildings. The challenges associated with implementing passive vents and the factors affecting performance are outlined. A comprehensive design methodology and quantified performance metrics are provided. Two hypothetical design examples are provided to illustrate the process. This document is intended to be useful to designers, decision-makers, and contractors implementing passive ventilation strategies. It is also intended to be a resource for those responsible for setting high-performance building program requirements, especially pertaining to ventilation and outdoor air. To ensure good indoor air quality, a dedicated source of outdoor air is an integral part of high-performance buildings. Presently, there is a lack of guidance pertaining to the design and installation of passive vents, resulting in poor system performance. This report details the criteria necessary for designing, constructing, and testing passive vent systems to enable them to provide consistent and reliable levels of ventilation air from outdoors.
Guidance on how to apply for Emergency Repair and Restoration Vehicle Exclusions.
Section 701 of the Energy Policy Act of 2005 (EPAct 2005) requires Federal agencies to use alternative fuel in dual-fueled vehicles when it is reasonably available and not unreasonably more expensive than gasoline (42 U.S.C. Section 6374(a)(3)(E)). Since 2007, Federal agencies have requested waivers for vehicles from the Section 701 requirements as part of a June data call for the subsequent fiscal year (FY). The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Federal Energy Management Program (FEMP) has reviewed those waiver requests and granted or denied them prior to the subsequent FY. At the end of each FY, DOE FEMP has reviewed each Federal agency's covered alternative fuel use and compared it to total fuel use in non-waivered vehicles to determine compliance. This guidance provides two different processes through which DOE will begin evaluating waiver requests for FY 2021 (beginning with the FY 2020 data call): Automated reporting in the Federal Fleet Sustainability Dashboard (FleetDASH), and waiver requests in FAST.
This guidance document for DOE Home Energy Score partners details different paths for mentoring new assessors as well as quality assurance standards and pathways for participating partners.
This document provides guidance for DOE's Home Energy Score Desktop Quality Assurance Auditors on best practices and tips for success in conducting in-field Home Energy Score assessments.
This presentation was given on October 25, 2021 to the Fossil Energy and Carbon Management Carbon Use Welcome Session for algae-based projects. It described the LCA tools available under the NETL CO2 Utilization Guidance Toolkit.
This report, prepared by U.S. DOE/NETL, gives guidance for extramural researchers on how to construct a techno-economic analysis to evaluate advanced technologies related to power plant condensers, and FGD wastewater treatment systems. For both technology classes, an overview of performance and cost issues is given, as well as recommendations for assumptions researchers can use to perform their own analysis. Using a common set of assumptions for all analyses allows the research community to compare results, since the same set of assumptions is used for all cases. This paper was discussed in a session at the 2019 NETL Crosscutting Program Technology Review meeting.