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Fermilab acquires goods and services in a manner consistent with the U.S. Department of Energy’s small business policies. This includes subcontracting with Small Businesses, Small Disadvantaged Businesses, Woman Owned Businesses, Veteran Owned Businesses, Service Disabled Veteran Owned Businesses and Historically Underutilized Business Zone certified businesses.
Increased market intelligence and business model innovation is needed to build contractor confidence in high-performance building technologies in order to increase the speed and scale of adoption to meet the U.S. Department of Energy's building stock decarbonization goals. Although there have been important innovations in energy efficiency, affordability, and decarbonization of building technologies, consumers are not purchasing these technologies at the necessary speed and scale partially due to a gap in institutional understanding around barriers contractors face in providing and servicing these technologies. Small businesses in this market must mitigate risk around high-performance building technologies, limiting their opportunities in the market and impacting the rate of adoption. The Building Business Network (B-Biz) aims to provide high-performance building technology solutions to underserved customers by collaborating with local small businesses that provide and service high-performance building technologies in communities with the lowest rates of adoption. This research explores the current market, the importance of business models, and the opportunity to utilize small businesses to address market gaps in underserved communities.
The possibilities of satellite servicing as a business opportunity are examined. The service rate which a user must be charged to yield a reasonable return is derived and then compared against the market's willingness to pay that rate. Steps taken to provide the basis from which the service rate could be derived include: (1) constructing a hypothetical on orbit servicing business offering both on orbit and associated ground services; (2) estimating the total on orbit service business potential by analyzing mission models to the year 2000; and (3) setting up ground rules to bound the conduct of the business. Using this basic information service demand (business volume) cost to set up the business, costs for operation and maintenance tax rates and desired rate of return are estimated to determine the user charge. Sensitivity of the service rate to various parameters are also assessed. The time span for the business venture runs from 1986 through 2000 with service to 1991 provided via the orbiter and by a space station beyond 1991. This point analysis shows about five years of negative cash flow, with steady profits thereafter.
This study was conducted to provide NASA-Kennedy Space Center with information and recommendations to support establishing one or more technology-based business incubators In Florida. The study involved assembling information about incubators: why they succeed, why they fail, how they are organized, and what services they provide. Consequently, this study focuses on widely-recognized "best practices," needed to establish successful technology- based business incubators. The findings are used to optimize the design and implementation of one or more technology-based business incubators to be established in Florida. Recommendations reflect both the essential characteristics of successful incubators and the optimal business demographics in Florida. Appendix A provides a fuller description of the objectives of the study. Technology-based business incubators are an increasing catalyst of new business development across the USi Incubators focus on providing entrepreneurs and small start-up firms with a wide array of support services necessary to bring forth new products and processes based on technologies developed in the nation's federal and private laboratories and universities. Appendix B provides extensive discussion of findings relative to technology- based business incubators.
Climate change poses risks to the assets and operations of businesses. They can anticipate, prepare for, and adapt to the potential impacts of climate change by focusing on modifying their own internal operations. But businesses can find additional opportunities to adapt by examining their relationships with local governments. Businesses provide critical services to the communities in which they are located, and also benefit from services provided by the local governments. This symbiotic relationship is an important consideration for businesses as they work to adapt to a changing climate. By thinking broadly about how working with local governments can influence their resilience, businesses may be able to uncover additional adaptation opportunities and enhance their adaption efforts in ways they may not be able to achieve on their own. Here, this paper includes two case studies of businesses that pursued adaptation efforts with local, state, or federal government officials to provide real-world context for the symbiotic relationships that exist between the private and public sectors in communities.
The Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Light Water Reactor Sustainability Program aims to develop and deploy technologies that will make the existing U.S. nuclear fleet more efficient and competitive. The program has developed a standard methodology for determining the impact of new technologies in order to assist nuclear power plant (NPP) operators in building sound business cases. The Advanced Instrumentation, Information, and Control (II&C) Systems Technologies Pathway is part of the DOE’s Light Water Reactor Sustainability (LWRS) Program. It conducts targeted research and development (R&D) to address aging and reliability concerns with the legacy instrumentation and control and related information systems of the U.S. operating light water reactor (LWR) fleet. This work involves two major goals: (1) to ensure that legacy analog II&C systems are not life-limiting issues for the LWR fleet and (2) to implement digital II&C technology in a manner that enables broad innovation and business improvement in the NPP operating model. Resolving long-term operational concerns with the II&C systems contributes to the long-term sustainability of the LWR fleet, which is vital to the nation’s energy and environmental security. The II&C Pathway is conducting a series of pilot projects that enable the development and deployment of new II&C technologies in existing nuclear plants. Through the LWRS program, individual utilities and plants are able to participate in these projects or otherwise leverage the results of projects conducted at demonstration plants. Performance advantages of the new pilot project technologies are widely acknowledged, but it has proven difficult for utilities to derive business cases for justifying investment in these new capabilities. Lack of a business case is often cited by utilities as a barrier to pursuing wide-scale application of digital technologies to nuclear plant work activities. The decision to move forward with funding usually hinges on demonstrating actual cost reductions that can be credited to budgets and thereby truly reduce O&M or capital costs. Technology enhancements, while enhancing work methods and making work more efficient, often fail to eliminate workload such that it changes overall staffing and material cost requirements. It is critical to demonstrate cost reductions or impacts on non-cost performance objectives in order for the business case to justify investment by nuclear operators. The Business Case Methodology (BCM) addresses the “benefit” side of the analysis—as opposed to the cost side—and how the organization evaluates discretionary projects (net present value (NPV), accounting effects of taxes, discount rates, etc.). The cost and analysis side is not particularly difficult for the organization and can usually be determined with a fair amount of precision (not withstanding implementation project cost overruns). It is in determining the "benefits" side of the analysis that utilities have more difficulty in technology projects and that is the focus of this methodology.
Performance advantages of the new pilot project technologies are widely acknowledged, but it has proven difficult for utilities to derive business cases for justifying investment in these new capabilities. Lack of a business case is often cited by utilities as a barrier to pursuing wide-scale application of digital technologies to nuclear plant work activities. The decision to move forward with funding usually hinges on demonstrating actual cost reductions that can be credited to budgets and thereby truly reduce O&M or capital costs. Technology enhancements, while enhancing work methods and making work more efficient, often fail to eliminate workload such that it changes overall staffing and material cost requirements. It is critical to demonstrate cost reductions or impacts on non-cost performance objectives in order for the business case to justify investment by nuclear operators. The Business Case Methodology (BCM) was developed in September of 2015 to frame the benefit side of II&C technologies to address the “benefit” side of the analysis—as opposed to the cost side—and how the organization evaluates discretionary projects (net present value (NPV), accounting effects of taxes, discount rates, etc.). The cost and analysis side is not particularly difficult for the organization and can usually be determined with a fair amount of precision (not withstanding implementation project cost overruns). It is in determining the “benefits” side of the analysis that utilities have more difficulty in technology projects and that is the focus of this methodology. The methodology is presented in the context of the entire process, but the tool provided is limited to determining the organizational benefits only. This report describes a the use of the BCM in building a business case for mobile work packages, which includes computer-based procedures and other automated elements of a work package. Key to those impacts will be identifying where the savings are “harvestable,” meaning they result in an actual reduction in headcount and/or cost. The report describes the specific activities conducted with a partner utility to examine the various work activities associated with mobile work packages to determine what time savings and error rate reductions are available. The report summarizes these findings in the form of a business case for the technology.
This paper presents a generic business case for implementation of technology that supports Control Room Modernization (CRM). The analysis presented in two forms; 1) a standalone technology upgrade, and 2) a technology upgrade that is built upon and incremental to a prior business case created for Mobile Work Packages (MWP). The business case contends that advanced communication and networking and analytical technologies will allow NPP to conduct control room operations with improved focus by reducing human factors and redundant manpower, and therefore operate with fewer errors. While some labor savings can be harvested in terms of overtime, the majority of savings are demonstrated as reduced time to take the plant off line and bring back on line in support of outages. The benefits are quantified to a rough order of magnitude that provides directional guidance to NPPs that are interested in developing a similar business case. This business case focuses on modernization of the operator control room and does not consider a complete overhaul and modernization of a plants instrument and control systems. While operators may be considering such an investment at their plants, the sizable capital investment required is not likely supported by a cost/benefit analysis alone. More likely, it is driven by obsolescence and reliability issues, and requires consideration of mechanical condition of plant systems, capital depreciation, financing, relicensing and overall viability of the plant asset over a 20-year horizon in a competitive market. Prior studies [REF] have indicated that such a modernization of plant I&C systems, alone or as part of a larger modernization effort, can yield very significant reductions in O&M costs. However, the depth of research and analysis required to develop a meaningful business case for a plant modernization effort is well beyond the scope of this study. While CRM as considered in this study can be easily integrated as part of grander plant modernization effort, it can also be considered as a stand-alone project, implemented as a supervisorial layer over and above existing systems. CRM is enabled by a suite of technologies, which are described in further detail in the body of this report. They include: • Modernized control room with interactive displays • High-bandwidth wireless networks • Mobile devices • Component identification technology • Mobile wireless video cameras • Smart or task based operator displays • Computer-Based Procedures (CBP)/Automated Mobile Work Packages (MWP) • Intelligent plant configuration • Advanced data analytics An analysis was conducted to determine how these technologies might impact outage operations at an NPP. The analysis concluded that outage management capabilities would be improved with application of these technologies, and result in annual benefits for the plant. These improved capabilities were identified and described in further detail in this report. • Reduction in need redundant manpower (verification, etc) • Improved critical path shutdown and restart duration during outages • Reduction in human factors and errors • Remote watches • Paperless outage coordination • Bulk work optimization
Indoor air pollutant concentrations can be higher than those outdoors, putting occupants at risk. These pollutants come from a variety of sources: materials used to build and furnish indoor spaces, retail products and services, and occupants themselves. Ventilation, temperature, and humidity also affect indoor air quality. It is important to consider the documented benefits of healthy indoor environments at any time – not just during a public health crisis – and it is key to consider the indoor air quality where we do business as well as at home. Small businesses vary in size, services, products, ownership style, and building mechanical systems, yet all benefit from healthy indoor spaces for employees and customers. This guide provides steps, in conjunction with public health guidance, that small businesses can take to improve and maintain indoor air quality. Small businesses often have unique ownership structures – the building owner and business owner can be different parties – so this guide addresses both building and business owner action items. There are many ways to pursue healthy indoor air, including eliminating, minimizing, and/or controlling the contaminants we bring in, and removing or diluting any existing contaminants through ventilation, filtration, air cleaning, and/or disinfection. Best results are achieved through a comprehensive approach combining various strategies, including those discussed in this guide.
This panel session provided a fast paced, high energy and thought-provoking session on how to do business with the US DOE. Charles Smith, the Director, of the US DOE Office of Small and Disadvantaged Business Utilization (OSDBU) provided an overview of DOE OSDBU's best practices. Representatives from the Office of EM and the NNSA will give attendees insight on how to market and seek opportunities within their program offices, sites and laboratories. Also featured current DOE, small business Presidents, shared best practices on how to engage with DOE, find and win contracts. Presentations proposed include: 1 - Doing Business with the U.S. Department of Energy (Charles R. Smith, US DOE OSDBU (USA)); 2 - Small Business Contracting with the US DOE (Tamara Miles, US DOE (USA)); 3 - Small Business Contracting with NNSA (Greg Gonzales, US DOE NNSA (USA))
This panel session focused on small business procurement and contracting opportunities within the DOE Complex and USACE FUSRAP Sites. The federal government encourages prime contractors to obtain goods and services from small and disadvantaged businesses (Tier 2) and often tie these goals to contract award fee. Goods and services being considered for these procurements include decontamination and decommissioning, remediation, transportation and disposal of radioactive waste, health physics, emergency response planning and training, lab services, R and D products, waste treatment, maintenance, A/E and professional consulting. Panelists with presentations: Small Business Procurement and Contracting Opportunities within the US DOE Complex and USACE FUSRAP Program (Aaron Deckard; Subcontracting Opportunities with the DOE Primes (William Badger); Bechtel National, Inc. Small Business Opportunities (Lisa Tribuce-Leoung Tat); Small Business Procurement and Contracting Opportunities (Gina Joiner); Small Business Procurement and Contracting Opportunities - Flour (Katy Burnau); Environmental WORK, Formerly Utilized Sites Remedial Action Program (FUSRAP) (John Busse)
The feasibility of applying strategic business planning techniques which are developed and used in the private sector to the planning of certain projects within the NASA Office of Space and Terrestrial Applications was assessed. The methods of strategic business planning that are currently in use in the private sector are examined. The typical contents of a private sector strategic business plan and the techniques commonly used to develop the contents of the plan are described, along with modifications needed to apply these concepts to public sector projects. The current long-range planning process in the Office of Space and Terrestrial Applications is reviewed and program initiatives that might be candidates for the use of strategic business planning techniques are identified. In order to more fully illustrate the information requirements of a strategic business plan for a NASA program, a sample business plan is prepared for a hypothetical Operational Earth Resources Satellite program.
The business rules that underlie an enterprise emerge as a new category of system requirements that represent decisions about how to run the business, and which are characterized by their business-orientation and their propensity for change. In this report, we introduce a decision making methodology which addresses several aspects of the business rules lifecycle: acquisition, deployment and evolution. We describe a meta-model for representing business rules in terms of an enterprise model, and also a decision support submodel for reasoning about and deriving the rules. The possibility for lifecycle automated assistance is demonstrated in terms of the automatic extraction of business rules from the decision structure. A system based on the metamodel has been implemented, including the extraction algorithm. This is the final report for Daniela Rosca's PhD fellowship. It describes the work we have done over the past year, current research and the list of publications associated with her thesis topic.
The United Space Congress established the SBIR program in 1982 for the following purposes: ( 1) Stimulate technological innovation (2) Increase private-sector commercialization derived from federal R&D (3) Use small business to meet federal R&D needs (4) Foster and encourage participation by disadvantaged persons and women in technological innovation The STTR program was established in 1992 with the additional requirement of having a small business partner with a research institution (usually a university) for the purpose of transferring intellectual property from the research institution to the small business concern for enabling a government technical need and furthering the technological development for the purpose of developing commercial products. The government of Japan has established a program that models portions of the U.S. SBIR and STTR programs. They are very interested in how NASA has been so successful in fulfilling the Congressional objectives of these programs. In particular, they want to understand the management practices and incentives that are provided to enable partnerships between business enterprises, academia and government. The speech will also focus on some of the many successful technologies (on a conceptual level) that have been developed through NASA s SBIR and STTR programs and mechanisms used to promote cooperation between small businesses, large businesses, academia and government agencies within the United States. The speech is on a conceptual level, focusing on U.S. and NASA policies and management implementation practices. No enabling technical discussion will be held.
Business plan competitions are used in many industries to stimulate interactions between startup companies and potential investors, inducing investment in those companies and fueling technology transfer into the marketplace. However, no empirical studies have tested the effectiveness of these competitions at helping companies raise funding and become a successful business entity. We use a difference-in-differences model to estimate the effect of participation in the National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s (NREL) Industry Growth Forum (IGF), a clean technology business plan competition. We find that companies that present at the IGF on average raise $\$$4.4M (p<0.01) more than those that applied and were not selected to present. We find no significant effect from company location and proximity to investors, which suggests that the business clusters’ effect on a company’s success may be limited. Presenting companies exhibit increased investment syndication compared to the rest of the clean technology industry; for example, an IGF presenter with $\$$9M in funding may have twice the number of investors as typical clean technology startups that raised the same amount of funding but did not present at the IGF. These findings suggest that business competitions can help nascent companies raise financing and help venture capitalists find investment opportunities, and may serve as an effective policy tool to facilitate the growth of clean technology companies, industries, and technology transfer.
As part of the Transactive Systems Program at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, a value modeling system was developed to support the evaluation of transactive systems. The technique is general enough to be applied outside transactive systems and to demonstrate this capability, a project was undertaken to use this value modeling technique as a means for modeling the valuation process undertaken by vertically integrated utilities when undergoing integrated resource planning (IRP). IRP is the process by which vertically integrated utilities (those that both serve customers directly as well as manage and run generation assets to do so) regularly go through to demonstrate to their regulators that they have a plan to meet the expected future load of their customers in a least cost and compliant manner. Traditionally this has been primarily an issue of how many and of which types of power plants to build but increasingly has included alternative measures such as demand response programs. Increasingly, environmental regulations play a significant role in both determine what types of power plants can be built under current regulations as well as what retrofits or upgrades need to be made to existing plants to allow them to continue to operate. Two use-case diagrams were constructed, one showing the showing the process by which IRP is carried out and another showing how a vertically integrated utility procures the resources it requires to meet load now and in the future. These diagrams help clarify the difference and provide a high-level outline of the two processes. A class diagram was constructed to clearly define the types of actors that would be considered in this model and the relationships between them. This diagram tacitly indicates which types of actors are and are not included in the model which provides significant guidance in defining the scope of the model. The relationship between the classes/actors provides further indication of what areas of the model have higher levels of detail and by implication bear more significance in modeling the system. Using the classes/actors defined in the class diagram, a business value diagram was constructed that defines the key value streams exchanged between the actors. This diagram provides a clear expression of the business case of the vertically integrated utility and who its counterparties are during the process of meeting load. These value streams have not only to do with meeting the load but doing so in a manner that meets environmental regulations. Increasingly, IRPs have three key metrics to evaluate a given plant to meet load: net present value of revenue required, emissions, and renewable energy credits. From this business value diagram, more detailed activity diagrams were formed that focus on a few of the key value stream exchanges, showing the process by which each party accrues value. These diagrams provide insight into the timing and sequence of the interactions in a way that the business value diagrams did not. The transactive value model was found to be highly compatible with IRP and provided a clear, simple model of the analysis done during IRP and key metrics driving IRP decisions. In particular it highlighted a few key items that may or may not have been as clear prior to the development of the model. Specifically, the role of the environmental regulations has become increasingly important and two of the three key metrics by which IRPs are typically evaluated are environmentally focused. Additionally, though generally not acknowledged, the role of the investor was included in this model as they are an essential source of capital in building new power plants and cannot be ignored when defining the business case of the vertically integrated utility.
During the grant period, Rice University held a total of three regional Clean Energy Business Plan Competitions for graduate level students with a particular focus on attracting student startups in the clean energy space (clean tech, renewable energy, transportation, batteries, sustainability, etc.) Over the three years of the grant, the Rice Business Plan Competition awarded a total of three ${$}$50,000 DOE-sponsored prizes to the winning startups (${$}$150,000 total). The Rice Energy Business Plan Competition’s DOE Clean Tech competition leveraged the resources and infrastructure of the existing annual Rice Business Plan Competition (RBPC), which is the world’s largest and richest intercollegiate graduate-level business plan competition in the world
In 2016, WVR acquired the Wabash Integrated Gasification Combined Cycle (IGCC) Plant north of Terre Haute, Indiana. Initially, WVR intended to use the plant to produce ammonia using syngas converted to hydrogen. Part of the business plan was to capture and sequester the CO 2 byproduct with the goal of a net-zero carbon emitting plant. Now, with the demand for clean hydrogen-based power and fuel cell energy, the plant intends to produce power and sell hydrogen as a fuel source, still with the intent to sequester CO 2 and achieve net-zero emissions. The Wabash CarbonSAFE project’s objectives are to establish the feasibility of developing a commercial-scale geological storage complex at the WVR plant in Vigo County, Indiana, for storage of 50 million tonnes or more of CO 2 . The plant is expected to produce up to 2 million tons (1.82 million tonnes) of CO 2 annually as a byproduct of hydrogen production. Wabash CarbonSAFE has examined the feasibility of geologic storage of the CO 2 in the Potosi Dolomite Storage Complex of the Illinois Basin via an onsite characterization well at the WVR plant site. This document explores the business requirements to undertake such a project, outlining the outside influences on a business venture such as legislation, legal, regulatory, and business climate factors. This document then discusses the CO 2 source, potential partner sources, and the business financials that allow CCS to be commercially viable for Wabash Valley Resources.