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This Berkeley Lab Technical Brief summarizes key considerations for electric service equipment and utility infrastructure to support residential customer electrification and adoption of distributed energy resources such as photovoltaic solar and energy storage.
The Inflation Reduction Act has created substantial new programs that support adoption of solar power by low-income households, including the $7 billion Solar For All program and the Low-Income Communities Bonus Credit Program, which increases the investment tax credit for certain types of deployment. In addition, a growing number of states are using solar programs to reduce energy burdens and create energy justice opportunities for low-income households and disadvantaged communities. Verifying the income of participating customers is an important component of these programs. Program managers are seeking strategies to verify a large number of subscribing customers in an accurate, timely, and cost-efficient manner. To help inform program managers, Berkeley Lab investigated how a number of energy and non-energy programs manage income verification. The most common approach is to require proof through tax documents, pay stubs, or other formal income documentation, which can pose an impediment to enrolling eligible customers and create a paperwork burden for administrators. In order to reduce the burden for both the applicant and the program manager, some programs use alternative methods. We identify three common alternative verification methods: -Categorical eligibility: Customers enrolled in other, similar income-verified assistance programs are automatically eligible for enrollment in other income-qualified programs. -Geographic eligibility: Eligibility is based on the customer’s location within a specified area, typically a low-income or disadvantaged community or census tract, and; -“Self-attestation”: The participant claims eligibility with or without further documentation. We describe these options, their pros and cons, give examples of how they are used, and explore how some low-income programs address administrative issues, audits, or other quality control measures. Finally, we explore the risk of mistaken verifications (finding a participant eligible when they are not) in the different strategies. While this memo was initiated by a request relating to income-based community solar programs, the methods are applicable to any program with income eligibility requirements in the energy or non-energy sector. Funding was provided for this research by the Solar Energy Technologies Office of the US Department of Energy, through the National Community Solar Partnership.
Adoption of residential solar photovoltaic+energy storage systems (PVESS) is driven by both bill savings opportunities and customer demand for backup power. Prior work by this team (Gorman et al., 2022; Gorman et al., 2023) explored PVESS backup power capabilities during long-duration power interruptions (e.g., due to severe weather events), when customers are assumed to be able to anticipate the event and charge their batteries in advance. In many cases, however, power interruptions are unpredictable (and often relatively short); for those types of events, a customer will typically set its battery to maintain some minimum capacity in reserve in case of an interruption, which reduces the capacity available for managing utility bills. This study evaluates this operational tradeoff to help customers and installers configure backup reserve settings, and to inform decision-making more generally about the customer value of backup power services compared to utility bill savings. This study utilizes Berkeley Lab’s PRESTO tool to produce stochastic simulations of (predominantly short-duration) power interruption events, and builds on an earlier case-study demonstrating PVESS backup performance during short-duration interruptions (Baik et al., 2023).
This study explores tradeoffs between the use of home solar+storage systems for backup power versus day-to-day utility bill savings. The study focuses specifically on the “reserve setting” available with most home battery storage systems, which allow the customer to maintain some minimum level of storage in reserve in case of an unforeseen power interruption. The more capacity that is held in reserve, the greater the customer’s ability to ride-through possible power interruptions, but less capacity is then available to manage utility bills on a day-to-day basis. This study evaluates this operational tradeoff across a diverse set of locations and residential electricity tariff structures, relying on Berkeley Lab’s PRESTO model to stochastically simulate power interruption events, and exploring a range of sensitivities, including variations in customer value of lost load (VoLL), interruption frequency, and other key drivers. The results show that, in most circumstances, the opportunity cost of holding storage capacity in reserve, in terms of foregone bill saving, tends to outweigh any gains in reliability value associated with mitigated power interruptions. This finding is robust across tariff structures and across most of the sensitivities considered, including those related to rate level, customer load level, and storage sizing. There are a limited set of circumstances where raising the reserve setting improves the overall customer value (comprised of bill savings plus reliability value). Specifically, that exception occurs when all of the following conditions apply: (a) the customer resides in a location with exceptionally poor reliability, (b) the customer has exceptionally high VoLL; (c) the customer is on a net billing rate or on a TOU rate that allows grid discharging but not grid charging; and (d), depending on the location, the price arbitrage differential on that rate is relatively small. In all other circumstances analyzed, total customer value declines with reserve level.
Berkeley Lab provided technical assistance to the New England Conference of Public Utilities Commissioners on challenges that participants in retail demand response programs face to accessing ISO-NE wholesale markets. This report summarizes findings from the technical assistance and includes actions that New England regulators can take to address the challenges to wholesale market access.
The following report summarizes the results of a Monte Carlo simulation and modeling study of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s (LBL) Monoenergetic Photon Source (MPS) as part of a high-energy LiDAR system for use in emergency response applications. A set of image quality indicators (IQI) and nonsensitive phantoms or generalized surrogates for search targets have been identified for use in the planned measurement campaign at the Berkeley Lab Laser Accelerator (BELLA) Center toward the end FY2023. These items were modeled and the time-of-flight (TOF) spectral responses following irradiation were calculated for a set of varying operating conditions. The goal of this study was to both predict the LiDAR system performance as well as determine if minor modifications to the IQI and phantom designs were required before fabrication. It was found that the IQI and target designs both overlap and extend towards the limit of performance of the system and are thus suitable for the final project measurement campaign.
The Least-cost Optimal Distribution Grid Expansion (LODGE) model provides the optimal portfolio of distribution system upgrades—e.g., voltage regulators, feeder reconductoring, transformer upgrades and non-wires alternatives (NWA), such as strategic siting of storage and distributed generation—to interconnect distributed energy resources (DERs) and enable load growth. It can be used to assess grid infrastructure costs and explore policy and regulatory solutions for distribution planning and DER valuation.In 2025, Berkeley Lab conducted three pilot analyses to validate LODGE results with empirical utility data before the model’s first release in 2026. The pilots, done with utilities in Washington, Colorado, and New Mexico, provide examples that illustrate how the model works, what it can do, and the value of the analysis.
It is my pleasure to introduce the 2009 annual report of the Advanced Photon Source. This was a very good year for us. We operated with high reliability and availability, despite growing problems with obsolete systems, and our users produced a record output of publications. The number of user experiments increased by 14% from 2008 to more than 3600. We congratulate the recipients of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Chemistry-Venkatraman Ramakrishnan (Cambridge Institute for Medical Research), Thomas Steitz (Yale University), and Ada Yonath (Weizmann Institute) - who did a substantial amount of this work at APS beamlines. Thanks to the efforts of our users and staff, and the ongoing counsel of the APS Scientific Advisory Committee, we made major progress in advancing our planning for the upgrade of the APS (APS-U), producing a proposal that was positively reviewed. We hope to get formal approval in 2010 to begin the upgrade. With advocacy from our users and the support of our sponsor, the Office of Basic Energy Sciences in the Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science, our operating budgets have grown to the level needed to more adequately staff our beamlines. We were also extremely fortunate to have received $7.9 M in American Recovery and Reinvestment Act ('stimulus') funding to acquire new detectors and improve several of our beamlines. The success of the new Linac Coherent Light Source at Stanford, the world's first x-ray free-electron laser, made us particularly proud since the undulators were designed and built by the APS. Among other highlights, we note that more than one-quarter of the 46 Energy Frontier Research Centers, funded competitively across the U.S. in 2009 by the DOE, included the Advanced Photon Source in their proposed work, which shows that synchrotron radiation, and the APS in particular, are central to energy research. While APS research covers everything from fundamental to applied science (reflected by the highlights in this report), the challenge of sustainable energy provides an opportunity for expanded involvement with industrial research. We were privileged to recruit several outstanding new leaders at the APS. Linda Young, from Argonne's Chemical Sciences Division, became the new Director of the X-ray Science Division (XSD). Chris Jacobsen (from Stony Brook University) has been added to Linda's team as an XSD Associate Division Director, joining George Srajer. Alexander (Sasha) Zholents (formerly of Berkeley Lab) became Director of the Accelerator Systems Division. Sasha is the inventor of the short-pulse x-ray scheme that we plan to implement in the APS-U to obtain very high average brightness, broadband, 1-ps x-ray pulses. Walter Lowe (formerly of Howard University) has taken a new position as senior advisor for outreach and development of the user community. Walter's role is to increase the diversity of the user community (with diversity read broadly to include users, institutions, and technical disciplines that are underrepresented at APS). Walter is also leading an effort to increase access for industrial users. I am confident that we have in place a great team to help our users and the APS take fullest advantage of the APS-U opportunity. In planning with users for the proposed APS-U, we focused on the need to study 'real materials under real conditions in real time' on spatial and temporal scales unavailable today. Only by studying materials as they are made-or as they perform-in difficult environments can we solve the grand challenge of higher-performance, sustainable materials for energy and health. The proposed APS-U will improve the brightness of penetrating x-rays produced by the APS over 100 times, and support our efforts in developing state-of-the-art instruments to address these challenges.
The U.S. Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute (JGI) invited scientists interested in the application of genomics to bioenergy and environmental issues, as well as all current and prospective users and collaborators, to attend the annual DOE JGI Genomics of Energy & Environment Meeting held March 22-24, 2011 in Walnut Creek, Calif. The emphasis of this meeting was on the genomics of renewable energy strategies, carbon cycling, environmental gene discovery, and engineering of fuel-producing organisms. The meeting features presentations by leading scientists advancing these topics. Berkeley Lab microbial ecologist Terry Hazen delivers a keynote on "The Gulf Oil Spill: Ecogenomics and Ecoresilience" at the 6th Genomics of Energy & Environment Meeting on March 22, 2011.
Berkeley Lab's Paramvir Dehal on "Managing and Storing large Datasets in MicrobesOnline, metaMicrobesOnline and the DOE Knowledgebase" at the Metagenomics Informatics Challenges Workshop held at the DOE JGI on October 12-13, 2011.
DOE JGI's Zhong Wang, chair of the High-performance Computing session, gives a brief introduction before Berkeley Lab's Shane Canon talks about "Exploiting HPC Platforms for Metagenomics: Challenges and Opportunities" at the Metagenomics Informatics Challenges Workshop held at the DOE JGI on October 12-13, 2011.
Adam Arkin from Berkeley Lab on the DOE Systems Biology Knowledgebase (KBASE) at the 7th Annual Genomics of Energy & Environment Meeting on March 21, 2012 in Walnut Creek, CA.
X-ray micro-tomography is a non-destructive characterization technique that allows imaging of materials structures with voxel sizes in the micrometer range. This level of resolution makes the technique very attractive for imaging porous ablators used in hypersonic entry systems. Besides providing a high fidelity description of the material architecture, micro-tomography enables computations of bulk material properties and simulations of micro-scale phenomena. This presentation provides an overview of a collaborative effort between NASA Ames Research Center and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, aimed at developing micro-tomography experiments and simulations for porous ablative materials. Measurements are carried using x-rays from the Advanced Light Source at Berkeley Lab on different classes of ablative materials used in NASA entry systems. Challenges, strengths and limitations of the technique for imaging materials such as lightweight carbon-phenolic systems and woven textiles are discussed. Computational tools developed to perform numerical simulations based on micro-tomography are described. These enable computations of material properties such as permeability, thermal and radiative conductivity, tortuosity and other parameters that are used in ablator response models. Finally, we present the design of environmental cells that enable imaging materials under simulated operational conditions, such as high temperature, mechanical loads and oxidizing atmospheres.Keywords: Micro-tomography, Porous media, Ablation
As Cloud services gain in popularity for enterprise use, vendors are now turning their focus towards providing cloud services suitable for scientific computing. Recently, Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) introduced the new Cluster Compute Instances (CCI), a new instance type specifically designed for High Performance Computing (HPC) applications. At Berkeley Lab, the physicists at the Advanced Light Source (ALS) have been running Lattice Optimization on a local cluster, but the queue wait time and the flexibility to request compute resources when needed are not ideal for rapid development work. To explore alternatives, for the first time we investigate running the Lattice Optimization application on Amazon's new CCI to demonstrate the feasibility and trade-offs of using public cloud services for science.
In this April 23, 2012 Science at the Theater event, Berkeley Lab scientists discuss how they uncover the mysteries of disease in unlikely places. Speakers and topics include: World-renowned cancer researcher Mina Bissell's pioneering research on the role of the cellular microenvironment in breast cancer has changed the conversation about the disease. How does DNA instability cause disease? To find out, Christie Canaria images neural networks to study disorders such as Huntington's disease. Fruit flies can tell us a lot about ourselves. Susan Celniker explores the fruit fly genome to learn how our genome works. DNA is not destiny. Gary Karpen explores how environmental factors shape genome function and disease through epigenetics.
On Feb. 27, 2012 at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre, four Berkeley Lab scientists presented talks related to extreme science - and what it means to you. Topics include: Neutrino hunting in Antarctica. Learn why Spencer Klein goes to the ends of the Earth to search for these ghostly particles. From Chernobyl to Central Asia, Tamas Torok travels the globe to study microbial diversity in extreme environments. Andrew Minor uses the world's most advanced electron microscopes to explore materials at ultrahigh stresses and in harsh environments. And microbes that talk to computers? Caroline Ajo-Franklin is pioneering cellular-electrical connections that could help transform sunlight into fuel.
Berkeley Lab researchers at the National Center for Electron Microscopy recorded real-time observations of nanocrystal growth that support the theory of nanoparticles acting like artificial atoms. This electron microscopy movie shows nanoparticles becoming attached to form twisty chains that eventually align and attach end-to-end to become elongated nanowires. (Movie courtesy of Haimei Zheng)
Berkeley Lab researchers at the Molecular Foundry have elucidated important mechanisms behind oriented attachment, the phenomenon that drives biomineralization and the growth of nanocrystals. This electron microscopy movie shows the early stage of nanocrystal growth. Nanoparticles make transient contact at many points and orientations until their lattices are perfectly matched. The particles then make a sudden jump-to-contact to form attached aggregates. (Movie courtesy of Jim DeYoreo)