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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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All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
DOE OSTI2022

The Energy in Modular (EMOD) Buildings Method: A Guide to Energy-Efficient Design for Industrialized Construction of Modular Buildings

Industrialized construction has immense potential to address the growing need globally to build and upgrade the building stock to be affordable, energy-efficient, and resilient. It can also help achieve the United States' goal of a 50% reduction in U.S. greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 2030. Despite this potential, and the ever-increasing push for electrification and decarbonization of households in the United States, industrialized construction has not yet been leveraged specifically to help address these challenges and accelerate the pathway to meet these goals. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) aims to claim this missed opportunity by focusing on delivering affordable, grid-efficient net-zero energy (NZE) modular buildings for underserved communities to ensure an equitable transition to the future of clean energy, accelerate decarbonization of the built environment, and support the development of a high-productivity construction and energy efficiency workforce. The Energy in Modular (EMOD) method is our approach to designing, producing, and delivering affordable, net-zero energy, low-carbon, and healthier buildings at scale. The following energy efficiency strategies are part of the scope of this guide: envelope thermal control, envelope infiltration control, mechanical, electrical, and plumbing systems, smart controls, and solar plus storage. We draw synergies between design for manufacturing and assembly, process optimization, retrofit technologies, and digitization. Our goal is to influence the improvement and production of buildings to increase performance, enhance energy efficiency, and reduce GHG emissions. This guide documents the research and development efforts initiated by a set of design objectives to "modularize" a set of energy efficiency and low-carbon strategies into a housing unit while preserving and enhancing energy efficiency benefits and decarbonization pathways. This guide is intended to serve as a framework for housing developers, housing agencies, architects, energy experts, and process engineers or factory operator personnel who are critical to today's modular builder teams. This guide focuses on specific energy efficiency strategies, decarbonization pathways, and associated processes as part of NREL's research efforts. Stakeholders may substitute other means, methods, and technologies for the ones evaluated in this study.

29 ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY↗
DOE OSTI2021

Managing Cyber Supply Chain Risk for Renewable Energy Technologies

On July 1, 2021, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Cybersecurity, Energy Security, and Emergency Response (CESER) hosted a virtual workshop facilitated by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). Cybersecurity supply chain experts, researchers, and leaders in government and industry came together to share information on current and future challenges in securing emerging technologies and technical architecture. From a cybersecurity perspective, we need to move from a cybersecurity approach that focuses principally on legacy asset owners to one that incorporates more emphasis on end-point device manufacturers and third-party integrators. Cybersecurity for the global digital supply chain for manufacturers of consumer end-point devices—such as smart solar inverters and smart electric vehicle (EV) chargers—will be critical to the future cyber health of the grid.

29 ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY↗
DOE OSTI2021

Self-Security for Grid-Interactive Smart Inverters Using Steady-State Reference Model

Smart inverters exchange information with other devices through a shared communication link, making the inverters more prone to receive harmful commands from external parties. This erroneous data can be received due to an anomaly in the system, such as a device fault, unintentional utility operator action, or a cyber-attack. In this paper, a device-level self-security strategy is implemented using reference models for a grid-interactive inverter to examine the incoming power setpoints, detect the anomalies, and protect the system accordingly. The PQ setpoints received from the utility supervisory controller are autonomously examined using the inverter’s normal and stable operating regions before engaging the setpoints to the inverter’s local controller. Grid parameters are estimated in real-time during the examination process. The efficacy of the self-security algorithm is tested using a three-phase 3-kVA SiC-MOSFET inverter and a 12-kW NHR 9410 regenerative grid emulator. The results verify that the proposed method can detect harmful PQ setpoints that can cause abnormal or unstable inverter operation.

Gursoy, Mehmetcan↗
DOE OSTI2021

Metadata Schemas and Ontologies for Building Energy Applications: A Critical Review and Use Case Analysis

With the increasing digitalization of processes throughout the lifecycle of buildings, data exchanged between stakeholders and between building systems has grown significantly. However, a lack of semantic interoperability between data in different systems is still prevalent, hindering the development of applications that can be reused across buildings and limiting the scalability of innovative solutions. Semantics refers to the description of the meaning of the data in a way that can be consistently understood by applications. Recently, several competing initiatives have been developing metadata schemas and ontologies to express this semantic information for different applications in the building domain. This paper systematically reviews these schemas and conducts an analysis of five of them to evaluate their applicability to three high-value use cases for building operations: energy audits, automated fault detection and diagnostics and optimal control. The survey finds 40 schemas published in the last 10 years but but their actual use in industry is difficult to estimate. Among the five selected ontologies, several gaps are highlighted in relation to the three use cases. Recommendations for the future include better harmonization of these initiatives, more centralized repositories and search engines for these schemas as well as better industry engagement to facilitate their adoption.

Smart Building, Sematic, Metadata, Ontology, Data ↗
DOE OSTI2023

Blockchain cybersecurity audit platform

A cybersecurity distributed ledger is provided herein for managing, tracking, auditing, and securing assets in a power infrastructure. The cybersecurity distributed ledger may include a blockchain, and may combine with smart contract or smart negotiation technology, such as in a permissioned proof of authority blockchain. The cybersecurity distributed ledger may manage the complete life cycle of a grid asset, from asset requirement and specification, through production, testing, deployment, maintenance, and retirement. The cybersecurity distributed ledger may create an immutable record of the grid asset, which may be audited for regulatory compliance or build or development compliance. Further, the cybersecurity distributed ledger may store unique identifying information for a grid asset, which may be used to detect a security breach or other tampering with a grid asset. The cybersecurity distributed ledger may also track control or ownership of the grid asset, as well as changes or updates to the grid asset.

Mylrea, Michael E.↗
DOE OSTI2021

Smart Inverter Twin Model for Anomaly Detection

Smart inverters connected to a communication network are vulnerable to various anomalies in the form of cyberattacks. In this paper, a self-security approach is implemented using the digital twin concept for smart inverters. The digital twin is formed using the inverter’s dynamic model. Then, the incoming setpoints are autonomously examined using the digital twin, and only the safe setpoints are engaged to the inverter’s local controller. This paper demonstrates the details of the self-security algorithm and how the inverter’s digital twin is formed. In particular, the stable and unstable operation region is experimentally verified by changing the power setpoints engaged to the local controller, using a laboratory setup including a three-phase 1.5-kVA SiC-MOSFET inverter and a 12-kW NHR 9410 regenerative power grid emulator. The results demonstrate that the digital twin model can potentially protect inverters from abnormal operation by examining the incoming commands (new setpoints) using the inverter’s digital twin before engaging the setpoints to the local controller.

Hossen, Tareq↗
DOE OSTI2020

Electrification Annual Progress Report (FY2019)

During fiscal year 2019 (FY 2019), the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Vehicle Technologies Office (VTO) funded early stage research & development (R&D) projects that address Batteries and Electrification of the U.S. transportation sector. The VTO Electrification Sub-Program is composed of Electric Drive Technologies, and Grid Integration activities. The Electric Drive Technologies group conducts R&D projects that advance electric motors and power electronics technologies. The Grid and Charging Infrastructure group conducts R&D projects that advance grid modernization and electric vehicle charging technologies. This document presents a brief overview of the Electrification Sub-Program and progress reports for its R&D projects. Each of the progress reports provide a project overview and highlights of the technical results that were accomplished in FY 2019.

25 ENERGY STORAGE↗
DOE OSTI2021

Digital Twin for Self-Security of Smart Inverters

Smart inverters connected to a communication network are susceptible to man-in-the-middle attacks. In this paper, a self-security approach is implemented using the digital twin concept for smart inverters. The digital twin is formed using the inverter’s normal operating region and the inverter’s dynamic model. Then, the incoming setpoints are autonomously examined using the digital twin, and only the safe setpoints are engaged to the inverter’s local controller. This paper demonstrates how the inverter’s normal operating region and dynamic model are formed. In particular, the normal operation region is experimentally verified by changing the P and Q setpoints engaged to the local controller, using a laboratory setup including a three-phase 3-kVA SiC-MOSFET inverter and a 12-kW NHR 9410 regenerative power grid emulator. The results demonstrate that the self-security technique can potentially protect inverters from man-in-the-middle attacks by examining the incoming commands (new setpoints) using the inverter’s digital twin before engaging the setpoints to the local controller.

Hossen, Tareq↗
DOE OSTI2020

Communication-Constrained Expansion Planning for Resilient Distribution Systems

Distributed generation and remotely controlled switches have emerged as important technologies to improve the resiliency of distribution grids against extreme weather-related disturbances. Therefore it becomes important to study how best to place them on the grid in order to meet a resiliency criteria, while minimizing costs and capturing their dependencies on the associated communication systems that sustain their distributed operations. This paper introduces the Optimal Resilient Design Problem for Distribution and Communication Systems (ORDPDC) to address this need. The ORDPDC is formulated as a two-stage stochastic mixed-integer program that captures the physical laws of distribution systems, the communication connectivity of the smart grid components, and a set of scenarios that specifies which components are affected by potential disasters. The paper proposes an exact branch-and-price algorithm for the ORDPDC that features a strong lower bound and a variety of acceleration schemes to address degeneracy. The ORDPDC model and branch-and-price algorithm were evaluated on a variety of test cases with varying disaster intensities and network topologies. The results demonstrate the significant impact of the network topologies on the expansion plans and costs, as well as the computational benefits of the proposed approach.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
DOE OSTI2020

Smart-DS: Synthetic Models for Advanced, Realistic Testing: Distribution Systems and Scenarios

The explosion of new ideas for distributed energy resources and advanced distribution grid algorithms faces a critical challenge: how can one effectively develop and evaluate these breakthrough technologies without an adequate set of power systems network, load, and resource data to test against? Today's open test systems, particularly for distribution systems, are tiny and incomplete; and though with enough effort, obtaining utility data under NDA can overcome scale challenges, the results can't be openly shared, preventing fair comparison. The Smart-DS project-led by NREL in partnership with MIT, Universidad Pontificia Comillas, CYME, and EDD-is working to overcome this gap by generating multiple large-scale, open, synthetic, distribution systems that are realistic but not real. These datasets go beyond a single medium voltage feeder (~1000 customers) to cover entire metropolitan areas and their surrounds with up to hundreds of feeders and millions of customers, complete with low voltage customer connections and high voltage sub-transmission. This scale allows adequate testing and analysis of not just local controls and advanced DERs, but also multiple substation interactions, optimized switching, full-scale distribution-OPF, and more. To accompany these datasets, the project is also building a rich set of scenario generation tools that can be used for distribution and transmission systems alike. This includes automated, spatially aware access to world-class, high-resolution solar, wind, and weather data: forward looking generation mixes: and highly configurable DER, load, climate, outage, control-scheme, and other scenarios. We will also highlight DiTTo, an exciting open-source, multi-way distribution dataset transformation tool for many-to-many format translation with scenario, merge/split, and many other manipulation capabilities.

DERs↗
DOE OSTI2023

Evidence of Residential Demand Flexibility in a 46 Townhome Neighborhood

Demand response is an important emerging part of smart grids and it has been well researched from the theoretical and modeling perspectives. The empirical evidence on demand response is scarce, resulting in a limited understanding of many important aspects of demand response, including latency, cycling, and overrides - including acceptable impacts to customer comfort, convenience, and productivity in the new remote work era. We attempt to provide additional information to address this knowledge gap by sharing early results from the 46-townhome testbed located in Atlanta, GA. We report our findings from the first three months of experimental work. These focus on the delays associated with device status updates, characteristics of user overrides of control signals, and the share of devices available for demand response. We also provide some information about the duration of demand response events and a discussion of some properties of the testbed neighborhood.

Tsybina, Eve↗
DOE OSTI2023

Towards an Energy Future with Ubiquitous Electric Vehicles: Barriers and Opportunities

The electrification of personal transportation holds great potential for lowering greenhouse gas emissions and reducing climate change. The promise of electric vehicles (EVs) to serve these goals has resulted in a broad range of supporting policies aimed at encouraging widespread EV adoption at both the state and federal levels in the United States and around the world. While the EV revolution and prospects of a world with ubiquitous EVs are impacting various industries and many aspects of daily life, strategic interactions between the power grid and EVs are crucial for a successful energy transition. However, managing the interplay between EVs and the power grid remains a challenge. Motivated by that tension, this paper surveys a variety of solutions, policies, and incentives that are focused on effectively managing EV charging behaviors. The paper’s objective is to explore these tools to ensure that EV owners have ultimate control over their personal vehicles while simultaneously allowing the power grid to mitigate adverse network impacts. Furthermore, this paper examines the role of charging infrastructure technology and its strategic placement in facilitating the seamless integration of EVs into the grid. Additionally, the paper highlights financial mechanisms associated with EV integration and discusses the consequences of these mechanisms.

25 ENERGY STORAGE↗
DOE OSTI2020

Evaluation of smart charging for electric vehicle-to-building integration: A case study

Higher electric vehicle (EV) adoption will stress the importance of demand flexibility to achieve more economic, efficient, and reliable grid operation. Charging technologies will be paramount in shifting temporally to better fit the variable generation of wind and solar. As such, analysis is warranted on the benefits of EV charge scheduling with respect to installation cost, operation cost, difficulty of implementation, and grid flexibility. We tackle this by analyzing the cost savings of implementing an EV charge scheduling infrastructure to reduce demand charges and installation costs. In this paper, we analyze a case study for operation of 16 level 2 chargers and 1 fast charger for two different building types. We then evaluate various test phases for controlling building and charging loads using an adaptive charging network (ACN) algorithm to characterize the ACN’s potential to reduce overall project cost.

30 DIRECT ENERGY CONVERSION↗
DOE OSTI2020

Cost Reduction of School Bus Fleet Electrification With Optimized Charging and Distributed Energy Resources: Preprint

Considerations for electrifying school buses are presented with an analysis of battery sizing to match bus driving requirements. The charging and vehicle-to-building dispatch of the electric school buses were optimized to evaluate the potential to reduce the impact of the bus charging on the school's electric utility bill. Distributed energy resources (DER) and flexible building loads were also considered with the school bus electrification to evaluate the further reduction in energy costs with enhanced system integration and optimized dispatch. The effect of degradation on the school bus batteries was analyzed to determine if the smart charging and vehicle-to-building battery operation decreases the life of the battery. The results show that there is an opportunity to mitigate the increase of electric utility bills with improved charging controls and bi-directionally operating the school bus batteries to reduce building demand charges. The battery degradation analysis using dispatch with optimized charging and discharging shows acceptable battery life.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗
DOE OSTI2023

Open Building Operating System: An Open-Source Grid Responsive Control Platform for Buildings

Grid-interactive efficient buildings (GEBs) with flexible loads are a promising method to decarbonize buildings, shift loads during peak hours, and lower energy use and electricity costs. Despite the promising benefits of GEBs, automation systems that manage flexible loads in response to energy prices or other grid signals are still uncommon in small and medium commercial buildings. Recent literature demonstrates such control solutions, but they often rely on custom integrations lacking the tools and drivers needed for scalability. To address these gaps, our team has created a fully open-source software stack capable of integrating heterogeneous flexible building loads and implementing integrated portable control applications called the Open Building Operating System (OpenBOS). The software can be deployed over existing control architecture with a small capital cost. OpenBOS leverages semantic models, which have been the subject of recent investigations to facilitate application portability. The use of semantic data reduces the labor and expense required to deploy and update smart control applications, increasing scalability. In this paper, the semantic modeling schema "Brick" was used, but the proposed approach can also be applied to ASHRAE standard 223P, when released. This paper describes the methodology and software components of OpenBOS and demonstrates its functionality with a rule-based demand flexibility control application configured using a semantic model. This application was tested at a real building in NY that uses a dual-fuel heating system made up of five ductless heat pump mini-splits and a central furnace serving a single zone. The demonstration reduced electricity costs at the site by 27%, demand during a shed event by 49%, and furnace usage by 35%.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗
DOE OSTI2024

Electrical Fault and Power Quality Detection Algorithms and Customer-Owned DERs Monitoring with a Cyber Grid Guard System and DLT

In this study, the electrical fault and power quality detection algorithms and customer-owned DERs monitoring use cases were implemented, with a Cyber Grid Guard system and DLT. Electrical utilities continue to deploy more intelligent electronic devices (IEDs) inside and outside electrical substations, and are associated with customer-owned distributed energy resources (DERs). Data from these IEDs, such as power meters and protection relays, must be kept confidential and of high integrity. Blockchain technology has the potential to increase microgrid resilience by enhancing data sharing security. The growing use of IEDs and customer-owned renewable energy sources (DERs) may make it necessary to connect Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) with power system applications. We implemented the electrical faulted phase detection and power quality monitoring algorithms with a Cyber Grid Guard (CGG) system using DLT. In addition, the DERs (wind turbine farms) use case and protective relay cyber-event tests were assessed, by using the CGG system with DLT. In the experimental model, the testbed was created by using a real-time simulator and CGG system with power meters/ protective relays in the loop. The data collected from the CGG system and IEDs were compared with the same time stamp source. These results showed the successful assessment of protection, control and monitoring applications using a CGG system with DLT. In the future, power system applications for the ESGT with DERs and the CGG system will be based on executing smart contracts between electrical utilities and customer-owned DERs.

Piesciorovsky, Emilio↗
DOE OSTI2020

Custom Controls for Improved Demand Response from Heat Pump Water Heaters

As part of a Grid Modernization Laboratory Consortium (GMLC) project looking at defining grid services for a range of devices, NREL used a custom controller to investigate the ability of a HPWH to provide load add and load shed in hybrid and electric resistance mode using standard set point control. Based on those results, changes were made to the controls to increase the amount of grid services delivered, especially in the load-add case, and speed up the recovery from those events. The custom controls also include less common methods, such as duty cycling of the heat pump or elements. The improved controls led to an increase the amount of demand response that could be provided and enabled faster recovery. Results from the laboratory experiments will be presented, along with details about the custom controls that were implemented.

70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY↗
DOE OSTI2023

Integration of a Smart Outlet-Based Plug Load Management System with a Building Automation System

The growth of and reliance on renewable energy necessitate a multi-pronged approach to achieve grid reliability and economics. As they represent a notable portion of U.S. energy consumption, commercial buildings must play an active role in this effort. Conserving energy and responding to grid conditions through demand flexibility can be achieved through the integration of major building systems. Integration of plug and process loads with lighting and heating, ventilation, and air conditioning systems maximizes the effectiveness of integrated building energy management. In this research, we demonstrate the integration of smart outlets into a building automation system. We cover the installation process as well as the architecture required for smart outlets to communicate data to the building automation system and to receive commands back. After recording power measurements for one week as a baseline, we configured the building automation system to turn the smart outlets on and off according to a set schedule. This resulted in energy savings of 66% during 1 week on 25 plug loads. This work demonstrates that grid-interactive efficient buildings are achievable through building system integration.

building automation system↗