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At least 505 records · Page 28

Forecasting Solar Photovoltaic Power Production: A Comprehensive Review and Innovative Data-Driven Modeling Framework

The intermittent and stochastic nature of Renewable Energy Sources (RESs) necessitates accurate power production prediction for effective scheduling and grid management. This paper presents a comprehensive review conducted with reference to a pioneering, comprehensive, and data-driven framework proposed for solar Photovoltaic (PV) power generation prediction. The systematic and integrating framework comprises three main phases carried out by seven main comprehensive modules for addressing numerous practical difficulties of the prediction task: phase I handles the aspects related to data acquisition (module 1) and manipulation (module 2) in preparation for the development of the prediction scheme; phase II tackles the aspects associated with the development of the prediction model (module 3) and the assessment of its accuracy (module 4), including the quantification of the uncertainty (module 5); and phase III evolves towards enhancing the prediction accuracy by incorporating aspects of context change detection (module 6) and incremental learning when new data become available (module 7). This framework adeptly addresses all facets of solar PV power production prediction, bridging existing gaps and offering a comprehensive solution to inherent challenges. By seamlessly integrating these elements, our approach stands as a robust and versatile tool for enhancing the precision of solar PV power prediction in real-world applications.

14 SOLAR ENERGY↗

NASA Software Engineering Benchmarking Study

To identify best practices for the improvement of software engineering on projects, NASA's Offices of Chief Engineer (OCE) and Safety and Mission Assurance (OSMA) formed a team led by Heather Rarick and Sally Godfrey to conduct this benchmarking study. The primary goals of the study are to identify best practices that: Improve the management and technical development of software intensive systems; Have a track record of successful deployment by aerospace industries, universities [including research and development (R&D) laboratories], and defense services, as well as NASA's own component Centers; and Identify candidate solutions for NASA's software issues. Beginning in the late fall of 2010, focus topics were chosen and interview questions were developed, based on the NASA top software challenges. Between February 2011 and November 2011, the Benchmark Team interviewed a total of 18 organizations, consisting of five NASA Centers, five industry organizations, four defense services organizations, and four university or university R and D laboratory organizations. A software assurance representative also participated in each of the interviews to focus on assurance and software safety best practices. Interviewees provided a wealth of information on each topic area that included: software policy, software acquisition, software assurance, testing, training, maintaining rigor in small projects, metrics, and use of the Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) framework, as well as a number of special topics that came up in the discussions. NASA's software engineering practices compared favorably with the external organizations in most benchmark areas, but in every topic, there were ways in which NASA could improve its practices. Compared to defense services organizations and some of the industry organizations, one of NASA's notable weaknesses involved communication with contractors regarding its policies and requirements for acquired software. One of NASA's strengths was its software assurance practices, which seemed to rate well in comparison to the other organizational groups and also seemed to include a larger scope of activities. An unexpected benefit of the software benchmarking study was the identification of many opportunities for collaboration in areas including metrics, training, sharing of CMMI experiences and resources such as instructors and CMMI Lead Appraisers, and even sharing of assets such as documented processes. A further unexpected benefit of the study was the feedback on NASA practices that was received from some of the organizations interviewed. From that feedback, other potential areas where NASA could improve were highlighted, such as accuracy of software cost estimation and budgetary practices. The detailed report contains discussion of the practices noted in each of the topic areas, as well as a summary of observations and recommendations from each of the topic areas. The resulting 24 recommendations from the topic areas were then consolidated to eliminate duplication and culled into a set of 14 suggested actionable recommendations. This final set of actionable recommendations, listed below, are items that can be implemented to improve NASA's software engineering practices and to help address many of the items that were listed in the NASA top software engineering issues. 1. Develop and implement standard contract language for software procurements. 2. Advance accurate and trusted software cost estimates for both procured and in-house software and improve the capture of actual cost data to facilitate further improvements. 3. Establish a consistent set of objectives and expectations, specifically types of metrics at the Agency level, so key trends and models can be identified and used to continuously improve software processes and each software development effort. 4. Maintain the CMMI Maturity Level requirement for critical NASA projects and use CMMI to measure organizations developing software for NASA. 5.onsolidate, collect and, if needed, develop common processes principles and other assets across the Agency in order to provide more consistency in software development and acquisition practices and to reduce the overall cost of maintaining or increasing current NASA CMMI maturity levels. 6. Provide additional support for small projects that includes: (a) guidance for appropriate tailoring of requirements for small projects, (b) availability of suitable tools, including support tool set-up and training, and (c) training for small project personnel, assurance personnel and technical authorities on the acceptable options for tailoring requirements and performing assurance on small projects. 7. Develop software training classes for the more experienced software engineers using on-line training, videos, or small separate modules of training that can be accommodated as needed throughout a project. 8. Create guidelines to structure non-classroom training opportunities such as mentoring, peer reviews, lessons learned sessions, and on-the-job training. 9. Develop a set of predictive software defect data and a process for assessing software testing metric data against it. 10. Assess Agency-wide licenses for commonly used software tools. 11. Fill the knowledge gap in common software engineering practices for new hires and co-ops.12. Work through the Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) program with universities in strengthening education in the use of common software engineering practices and standards. 13. Follow up this benchmark study with a deeper look into what both internal and external organizations perceive as the scope of software assurance, the value they expect to obtain from it, and the shortcomings they experience in the current practice. 14. Continue interactions with external software engineering environment through collaborations, knowledge sharing, and benchmarking.

Rarick, Heather L.↗

A Technical and Economic Assessment of LWR Flexible Operation for Generation and Demand Balancing to Optimize Plant Revenue

With increased penetration of subsidized variable renewable energy (VRE) resources and competition from low natural gas prices, existing light water reactor (LWR) nuclear power plants (NPPs) are struggling to remain economically competitive. This work examines the potential economic competitiveness of various thermal energy storage (TES) technologies when coupled directly or indirectly with a NPP. To highlight their relative economic competitiveness, we contrast several energy storage solutions in stochastic dispatch optimization. We leverage data from recent work analyzing a range of TES technologies with varying capital costs, performance, and technology readiness level (TRL) to establish our case. We explore inserting these technologies into an electricity market with existing nuclear generation and large projected variable renewable energy (VRE) penetration. Although these technologies' projected capital costs may make them unlikely candidates in their current state, this analysis demonstrates a high-fidelity techno-economic analysis of energy storage. Furthermore, as the projected cost of energy storage technologies evolves, this analysis sets a precedent for similar future investigations. One region with projected trends that may be unfavorable for existing nuclear capacity is the New York Independent System Operator (NYISO) market. New York state’s baseload generation has been historically provided by fossil-fired and nuclear assets. However, amid economic pressures from subsidized VREs and low natural gas prices, the state has recently deactivated Indian Point nuclear power plant units 2 and 3. Furthermore, the state plans to meet its zero-emission generation target by 2040 by replacing fossil-fired capacity with significant investments in VRE resources like wind and solar photovoltaic (PV) and battery storage. Increased intermittent resource penetration lowers the baseload power requirement, adding further economic pressure to the state’s three remaining NPPs still in operation. With three NPPs still in operation in New York, this work analyzes potential economic benefits to NPPs on the New York grid when directly or indirectly coupled with various TES technologies. This work requires two modeling steps to analyze the potential economic benefits of various system configurations of the TES directly or indirectly coupled with nuclear. First, this analysis leverages capacity expansion modeling by experts at the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI). Using their deterministic capacity expansion model, U.S. Regional Economy, Greenhouse Gas, and Energy (US-REGEN), EPRI analysts evaluated the capacity and generation evolution of the New York state energy market under four projection scenarios. These four projection scenarios were developed to represent the potential evolution of the capacity and generation in NYISO from 2015 to 2050 under various economic, technology, and policy constraints. The results from these capacity expansion models are then used as boundary conditions in the second modeling step. The second modeling step uses the Holistic Energy Resource Optimization Network (HERON) for a set of stochastic techno-economic analyses (STEAs) to investigate the potential increase in the economic viability of various configurations of the TES. With no current capacity expansion capabilities, HERON takes the data generated from US-REGEN for 2050 to generate synthetic load, solar, and wind data. Then HERON economically optimizes the capacity and dispatch of the various TES configurations. The potential economic benefit is the differential net present value (NPV) of the TES configurations from the no-TES baseline. As a stochastic techno-economic analysis package, HERON introduces uncertainty into the economic metrics, while US-REGEN trades resolution for reduced computational complexity. Using HERON also allows the modeling of direct thermal coupling, a feature not common in capacity and dispatch models. As expected, with high capital costs, the costs of introducing energy storage for all the technologies considered outweighed the potential economic benefit of this strategy for flexible plant operation. The benefit of this analysis is primarily in demonstrating a workflow that examines innovative solutions to increase NPP revenue via TES coupling. HERON’s stochastic capacity and dispatch optimization process used in this work has proven an effective tool in observing and evaluating the impact of introducing storage technologies in a grid energy system.

25 ENERGY STORAGE↗

Proposed Solutions to Regulatory Barriers to Tribal Solar Development

The Tribal Solar Initiative is a partnership between NREL and the Midwest Tribal Energy Resources Association. The Tribal Solar Initiative project goal is to articulate key barriers to Tribal solar and Tribal solar-plus-storage adoption at all scales and to ready stakeholders to implement options to address these challenges. This conference presentation focuses on net-metering and a tribal solar case study regarding net-metering.

ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY,SOLAR ENERGY↗

Using Machine Learning to Understand Electric and Hybrid Vehicles Ownership in Burdened and Nonburdened Communities

Transitioning to electric and hybrid vehicles (EHVs) for all communities is a pivotal step toward sustainable transportation and environmental conservation. This paper aims to understand the adoption of EHVs, focusing on burdened communities (BCs) in the United States. The EHV ownership-based analysis combines two datasets—behavioral data from the Puget Sound Regional Travel Survey integrated with BCs (Justice40) data covering transportation insecurity, environmental burden, social vulnerability, health vulnerability, and climate and disaster risk burden. After creating this unique database, descriptive analysis and modeling are used to analyze the data and predict EHV ownership in the future. Specifically, we use a new method that combines particle swarm optimization (PSO) with a stacking model named PSO-Stacking, which incorporates heterogeneous base learners of machine learning and deep learning. PSO applies a customized objective function to select the optimal hyperparameters for heterogeneous learners within the stacking model, effectively addressing challenges such as multicollinearity, data imbalance, nonlinearity, and overfitting. The proposed solution covers more accurate results than standard benchmark models for EHV ownership in BCs and non-BCs. In addition, the results of the PSO-Stacking method are explained using the local interpretable model-agnostic explanations technique. Results show a negative correlation between the BCs indicators, that is, higher transportation insecurity associated with lower EHV ownership. Furthermore, BCs have higher future climate risk scores, diesel particulate matter levels, and PM2.5 in the air than non-BCs because of higher conventional vehicle ownership. These communities are at higher risk and can benefit from electrification, EV infrastructure, and EV policies to address environmental challenges.

Aslam, Zeeshan [ORNL]↗

OPFLearnData: Dataset for Learning AC Optimal Power Flow

The datasets are resulting from OPFLearn.jl, a Julia package for creating AC OPF datasets. The package was developed to provide researchers with a standardized way to efficiently create AC OPF datasets that are representative of more of the AC OPF feasible load space compared to typical dataset creation methods. The OPFLearn dataset creation method uses a relaxed AC OPF formulation to reduce the volume of the unclassified input space throughout the dataset creation process. The dataset contains load profiles and their respective optimal primal and dual solutions. Load samples are processed using AC OPF formulations from PowerModels.jl. More information on the dataset creation method can be found in our publication, "OPF-Learn: An Open-Source Framework for Creating Representative AC Optimal Power Flow Datasets" and in the package website: https://github.com/NREL/OPFLearn.jl.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗

Comprehensive assessment of deep reinforcement learning approaches for economic dispatch in nuclear-driven microgrids

As the electrical grid integrates more variable renewable energy sources such as wind and solar, the demand for distributed and flexible systems to address this increased variability becomes critical. Nuclear-driven microgrids provide a promising solution by offering stable generation to complement intermittent renewables, ensuring grid reliability and operating efficiency. This paper proposes a recurrent deep reinforcement learning framework for optimal economic dispatch in a nuclear-powered microgrid integrating renewable energy sources, small modular reactors, battery storage systems, and balance-of-plant dynamics. A three-agent control architecture is developed, where demand and renewable energy agents act as forecasters, and a reinforcement learning-based dispatch agent performs real-time energy allocation. A nonlinear programming formulation is first used to generate an optimal baseline for benchmarking. The proposed dispatch controller, based on Proximal Policy Optimization enhanced with Long Short-Term Memory networks, exploits temporal correlations in system dynamics by taking advantage of the time series used as inputs to improve policy robustness under uncertainty. Comparative analysis against established deep reinforcement learning methods, including Proximal Policy Optimization with a feedforward architecture, Soft Actor-Critic, and Twin Delayed Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient, demonstrates superior performance. Numerical results indicate that the proposed controller achieves a 0.39% cost reduction relative to the nonlinear programming benchmark and outperforms other learning-based methods by generating additional revenue of up to 0.35%. All reinforcement learning controllers compute dispatch actions in less than 0.3 s, resulting in a computational speedup of more than three orders of magnitude over the nonlinear programming baseline. The findings of this paper highlight their applicability for real-time operation and control in nuclear-integrated microgrids under volatile operating conditions.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗

About the Complex Natural and Engineered Systems Pillar

Los Alamos National Laboratory is a world leader in applying multi-disciplinary science to complex systems within the Complex Natural and Engineered Systems (CNES) challenge areas. Our search for solutions requires science and technology innovation, as well as an integrated experiment, theory, and modeling and simulation approach. Our research and development spans from improving engineered systems such as nuclear weapons and the power grid, to understanding the interface of human and engineered systems from the subsurface to space, to studying how complex natural systems such as disease and climate impact humanity.

29 ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY↗

Developing socially and economically generative, resilient PV-energy systems for low- and moderate-income communities: Applications for Puerto Rico (Final Technical Report)

The nexus of energy and poverty is one of the most significant long-term challenges facing the energy and electricity sectors, with negative feedback loops between energy-related costs, risks, and insecurities, on the one hand, and diverse other social and economic insecurities, on the other, helping to undermine health, wellbeing, and resilience in low- and moderate-income communities around the US and the world (Biswas et al. 2022). The transition of energy systems to clean energy alternatives offers a potential opportunity to redesign future energy arrangements in ways that, instead, create beneficial social value for communities, reverses the energy-poverty nexus, and enhances community wellbeing (Biswas et al. 2020; Miller et al. 2018). The promise of clean energy transitions to address the energy-poverty nexus is especially significant when designed using principles of just energy transitions. To leverage just clean energy transitions to accomplish a reversal of the energy-poverty nexus requires improvement in three capabilities: (1) Understanding and mapping the community-scale dynamics and variability of the energy-poverty nexus, which vary considerably from community to community; (2) Evaluating the technical, social, and economic potential for different clean energy system designs to deliver social value to specific communities; and (3) Working collaboratively with communities to imagine and design clean energy systems solutions that meet their needs, fit their capabilities and contexts, and deliver multiple forms of community-desired social value/benefits that help reverse key facets of the energy-poverty nexus. This project developed a portfolio of novel tools, methodological approaches, and collaborative partnerships with four communities in Puerto Rico that further the objective of building these three capabilities.

14 SOLAR ENERGY↗

Review of Technical Requirements for Inverter-Based Resources in Chile

This document compares the technical requirements in the grid code of Chile (NTSyCS) against the EirGrid (Ireland transmission system operator) and National Grid Electricity System Operator (NESO) grid codes and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) 2800-2022 standard for conventional inverter technology at the transmission and subtransmission levels in the process of being adopted by system operators in the U.S. The document is intended to be a guide and reference for future updates of the NTSyCS, considering the local system requirements and present improvements in inverter-based resource (IBR) technology. In light of the findings of the aforementioned comparative review, this document proposes and describes the requirements for conventional IBRs that could be incorporated and updated into the Chilean grid code. The document is structured around the main grid challenges posed by the transition to an IBR-dominated grid and conventional IBRs capabilities to help address them. This document does not provide guidance on how this specification should be implemented (e.g., through a mandate or market solution).

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗

Los Angeles 100% Clean Energy Equity Strategies

The National Renewable Energy Laboratory and Los Angeles Department of Water and Power set out to identify strategies to improve equity in LA's transition to 100% clean energy. Through social science research, NREL summarized underserved community member challenges and solutions from listening sessions and community-based organizations. NREL modeled future scenarios for solar, transportation electrification, rates, building technologies, and the distribution grid to identify strategies that improved community-prioritized equity metrics. Findings provide specific strategies relevant for LA and elsewhere to improve equity and affordability in achieving 100% clean energy.

100% clean energy↗

Shared micromobility as a first- and last-mile transit solution? Spatiotemporal insights from a novel dataset

The first- and last-mile (FM/LM) problem is a major deterrent to public transit use. With the rise of shared micromobility options such as shared e-scooters in recent years, there is a growing interest in understanding their potential to serve as a last-mile transit solution. However, empirical data regarding the integrated use of shared micromobility and public transit have been limited so far. As a result, much is unknown regarding the spatiotemporal patterns and characteristics of shared micromobility trips serving as an FM/LM connection to transit. Here, this paper addresses these knowledge gaps by leveraging a novel dataset (i.e., the Spin post-ride survey dataset) that records thousands of transit-connecting shared e-scooter trips in Washington DC. Specifically, we used the dataset to reveal the spatiotemporal patterns of transit-connecting shared e-scooter trips in Washington DC, resulting in some major policy insights regarding the integral use of shared e-scooters and public transit. We further leveraged the dataset to validate if and to what extent a commonly applied buffer-zone approach can infer FM/LM micromobility trips accurately. Statistical tests showed that the actual FM/LM Spin e-scooter trips differ from inferred FM/LM Spin e-scooter trips in both spatial and temporal dimensions. This indicates that the common practice of inferring FM/LM micromobility trips with a buffer-zone approach can lead to inaccurate estimates of transit-connecting micromobility trips.

29 ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY↗

Pathways Toward Electric Mobility in Hennepin County, Minnesota

This fact sheet presents the findings from a comprehensive community engagement initiative focused on advancing equitable transportation electrification in Hennepin County. This initiative responds to the critical need for inclusive and sustainable mobility solutions in the face of rising environmental and financial challenges in the transportation sector. This project has two goals. First, to learn what each community's priorities are and share them with the city, county, and state government to inform transportation plans and projects. Second, to bridge divides between government and community, building pathways for community-guided decision making on future transportation plans.

ADVANCED PROPULSION SYSTEMS,ENERGY PLANNING, POLIC↗

Avancando na Transicao Energetica: Desafios e Estrategias para a Implantacao Sustentavel de FV

As the world embarks on an ambitious journey towards global decarbonization, the spotlight turns to photovoltaic (PV) technology as a cornerstone for sustainable energy solutions. This talk delves into the current status and projections of PV for the World, US and Brasil, and the necessary considerations to do this increase in manufacturing and deployment sustainably. With the projected scale of deployment, the industry faces significant challenges related to material demand and the management of PV modules at their end of life. The principles of the Circular Economy (CE) and its associated R-Actions - Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, among others - present a promising framework to address these challenges by mitigating end-of-life management and material sourcing concerns. However, traditional CE metrics, often focused solely on mass, fall short by excluding vital energy flow considerations. In this talk, we will highlight how various metrics are needed to understand sustainable PV solutions, how continuing the search for increased efficiency can significantly reduce material demands and enhance energy metrics, while strategies around material circularity and module lifetime and reliability improvements will offer substantial reductions in both material and energy demands.

Brasil↗

Ten questions concerning energy flexibility in buildings

Demand side energy flexibility is increasingly being viewed as an essential enabler for the swift transition to a low-carbon energy system that displaces conventional fossil fuels with renewable energy sources while maintaining, if not improving, the operation of the energy system. Building energy flexibility may address several challenges facing energy systems and electricity consumers as society transitions to a low-carbon energy system characterized by distributed and intermittent energy resources. For example, by changing the timing and amount of building energy consumption through advanced building technologies, electricity demand and supply balance can be improved to enable greater integration of variable renewable energy. Although the benefits of utilizing energy flexibility from the built environment are generally recognized, solutions that reflect diversity in building stocks, customer behavior, and market rules and regulations need to be developed for successful implementation. In this paper, we pose and answer ten questions covering technological, social, commercial, and regulatory aspects to enable the utilization of energy flexibility of buildings in practice. In particular, we provide a critical overview of techniques and methods for quantifying and harnessing energy flexibility. We discuss the concepts of resilience and multi-carrier energy systems and their relation to energy flexibility. We argue the importance of balancing stakeholder engagement and technology deployment. Finally, we highlight the crucial roles of standardization, regulation, and policy in advancing the deployment of energy flexible buildings.

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗

Advances on CHP District Energy and Microgrids Deployment: Simplified Tool for Rapidly Deploying Feasibility Analytics for the Non-Technical User (Final Technical Report)

Community energy systems have proven to have the potential to improve cost efficiency, resilience, and decarbonize. However, investing in community energy systems such as community microgrids or district energy systems is a complex decision due to the high initial investment and the uncertainties associated with the long development time and lifecycle of the project. Tools that make feasibility assessments accessible to non-technical users like investors, policymakers, and other stakeholders will result in more feasibility analyses completed, more candidate projects identified, and more community energy systems deployed. The pilot tool developed under this award is named Energy Fellow. Energy Fellow allows technical and non-technical users to complete feasibility analyses for district energy systems and community microgrids. This is the first software tool of its kind designed for non-technical users and available at no cost. Its scope was adjusted to a 25x25-mile region within the Houston area in Texas to make its development compatible with the funding available. However, the findings and models developed make this pilot tool easily scalable to the US. The lessons learned during the design, implementation, and testing stages have helped find trade-off solutions to software and hardware challenges related to implementing 3D models in online tools. Green software strategies has been successfully applied to the design and operations of the tool, and the team has researched the aspects of the (non-technical) user experience that will make commercial developments of this tool even more impactful.

29 ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY↗

Optimally sited microgrids for energy resilience in Mount Desert Island, ME

Mount Desert Island (MDI) (≈110 sq mi; ≈10,000 year‑round residents) is located on the eastern coast of Maine. Acadia National Park is located on the island, protecting 47,000+ acres of land which draws millions of visitors annually. The island is divided into four towns (Tremont, Southwest Harbor, Mount Desert, Bar Harbor). The island’s distribution system is supplied by a single 35‑kV mainland feeder and a mix of aging distribution components; outage exposure is not uniform across the island. Residents fear that outage events are starting to exceed resilience expectations. MDI community leaders asked Sandia National Laboratories to characterize energy system vulnerability and to develop conceptual microgrid solutions that improve community resilience while also producing co‑benefits for reliability, access, and sustainable development.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗

Cybersecurity Considerations for Emerging Energy Technologies

AI, cloud computing, post-quantum cryptography, zero-trust architectures, microgrids, and virtual power plants. What do these things have in common? They are all emerging technologies in the clean energy space that will be a critical part of grid modernization efforts. As we work towards clean energy and decarbonization targets, these technologies, developed to solve real-world problems, will help us reach goals and achieve new efficiencies as the paradigm of grid operation shifts. However, there are growing concerns about the cybersecurity risks associated with these trending topics as they are used in critical infrastructure applications. This talk will cover gaps, challenges, and opportunities for the secure implementation of grid modernization solutions and novel energy applications of state-of-the-art networking and communications. Proactive risk mitigation strategies, including the application of cyber-informed engineering, will be discussed. Practical applications of these techniques will help provide countermeasures to the impact of cyberattacks on critical infrastructure technologies in a new, digitized grid landscape.

14 SOLAR ENERGY↗