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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 OSTI2024

Techno-economic analysis of renewable energy generation at the South Pole

Transitioning from fossil-fuel power generation to renewable energy generation and energy storage in remote locations has the potential to reduce both carbon emissions and cost. Here, this study presents a techno-economic analysis for implementation of a hybrid renewable energy system at the South Pole in Antarctica, which currently hosts several high-energy physics experiments with nontrivial power needs. A tailored model of resource availability and economics for solar photovoltaics, wind turbine generators, lithium-ion energy storage, and long-duration energy storage at this site is explored in different combinations with and without existing diesel energy generation. The Renewable Energy Integration and Optimization (REopt) platform is used to determine the optimal system component sizing and the associated system economics and environmental benefit. We find that the least-cost system includes all three energy generation sources and lithium-ion energy storage. For an example steady-state load of 170 kW, this hybrid system includes 180 kW-DC of photovoltaic panels, 570 kW of wind turbines, and a 3.4 MWh lithium-ion battery energy storage system. This system reduces diesel consumption by 95% compared to an all -diesel configuration, resulting in approximately 1200 metric tons of carbon footprint avoided annually. Over the course of a 15-year analysis period the reduced diesel usage leads to a net savings of 57 million United States dollars, with a time to payback of approximately two years. All the scenarios modeled show that the transition to renewables is highly cost effective under the unique economics and constraints of this extremely remote site.

29 ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY↗
DOE OSTI2020

Oneida Indian Nation Community-Scale Clean Energy Deployment Combined Heat and Power Project. Tribal Renewable Energy (Final Technical Report)

This document reports on the Oneida Indian Nation's to upgrade and improve the operation of the Nation’s Central Utility Plant (CUP) so that previously wasted energy could be captured and utilized to produce electricity. The final technical report contains an overview of the project and the project objectives, which are increased energy efficiency, reduced dependency on fossil fuels, and lower energy costs while maintaining sound environmental stewardship of natural resources. The report describes the specific activities and milestones accomplished, a summary of the current status of the project, including objectives and results achieved, and a description of project management, challenges and lessons learned.

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗
DOE OSTI2021

Energy Savings Performance Contracting for Small Projects

Energy Savings Performance Contracting (ESPC) is a budget-neutral approach to make building improvements that reduce energy and water use and increase operational efficiency. ESPC can help public-sector planners use tomorrow’s energy savings to fund today's facility and infrastructure upgrades. This resource highlights strategies and case studies for implementing ESPC in smaller towns, rural counties, and small school districts to complete energy upgrades and maximize energy and cost savings.

29 ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY↗
DOE OSTI2021

An Ally in Your Corner: Benefits of Using Owner's Representatives

This short guide provides prospective ESPC customers with key considerations for retaining an owner's representative ("owner’s rep"), specifically regarding recommended areas of competency and qualifications. It also provides a summary of resources to help with finding or soliciting owner's rep services. This information may also be valuable for ESPC program administrators considering how to promote the use of owner’s reps for projects in their state.

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗
DOE OSTI2023

Medical Imaging Equipment Energy Efficiency [Slides]

The slide deck is being prepared for healthcare sector stakeholders as a resource on the energy use of Medical Imaging Equipment (MIE) which will provide an overview of existing work, review existing literature on MIE energy use and identify energy efficiency opportunities.

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗
DOE OSTI2020

Smart technologies enable homes to be efficient and interactive with the grid

Oak Ridge National Laboratory researchers compare two different approaches to test how advanced, energy-efficient building technologies such as smart thermostats, heat pump water heaters, and advanced heat pump HVAC (heating, ventilation and air conditioning) can be optimized within a home and connected at a neighborhood-scale load to a community microgrid in the Alabama Power Smart Neighborhood located in Hoover. Working with Southern Company and Alabama Power, ORNL researchers are pioneering that future where smart homes and smart neighborhoods can benefit both homeowners and utilities, by reducing energy consumption by 44% and peak demand by 34%.This project is one of two neighborhoods in the U.S Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Connected Neighborhood project, supported by Building Technologies Office , where ORNL researchers leverages DOE investment in micro-grids and responsive, flexible building loads research to improve grid reliability – a goal of DOE’s Grid-interactive Efficient Buildings (GEB) Initiative. Researchers control the neighborhood and microgrid to enable utilities achieve their desired load and cost profiles while ensuring the comfort of homeowners in the Smart Neighborhood. This transactive control approach maximizes the utilization of technical resources of the microgrid and controllable loads, while reducing costs for both the homeowners and Alabama Power. These tests partially seek to determine a more precise range of tolerance with respect to occupant comfort as researchers work to facilitate customer acceptance and perception of new building technologies that enable energy savings.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗
DOE OSTI2022

Material Flow Analysis and Life Cycle Assessment of Polyethylene Terephthalate and Polyolefin Plastics Supply Chains in the United States

Plastics are useful and beneficial materials that contribute to an improved quality of life, yet they generate significant solid wastes and emissions and consume significant energy resources. Systems analysis is incomplete on current linear production systems of plastics supply chains and their associated processes. Our study combines material flow and life cycle assessment data sets of polyethylene terephthalate (PET) and the main polyolefin polymers in the United States, comprising over 70% of plastics flows. This study estimates the total greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and energy consumption of these supply chains, including transportation and end-of-life processes, lacking in prior studies. Here we calculate annual GHG emissions and energy consumption of these plastic supply chains to be 101 MMT CO 2 -eq and 3248 PJ in 2019, respectively. The GHG emissions of these supply chains represented 1.5% of the total U.S. emissions and 5% of the total U.S. industry-related GHG emissions. The total energy consumption of these supply chains represented 3.1% of the total U.S. energy consumption in 2019. Transportation of PET and polyolefin plastic materials contributes 5% and 2% to the total supply chain GHG emissions and energy consumption, respectively. This baseline study provides a benchmark and enables a comparison to future circular production systems for plastics in the United States.

09 BIOMASS FUELS↗
DOE OSTI2024

Unlocking Manufacturing Sustainability: Energy Efficiency Opportunities through the US Department of Energy’s Better Plants Program Energy Treasure Hunts (2023–2024)

The US manufacturing sector faces critical challenges: improving sustainability, reducing energy consumption, and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Energy Treasure Hunt (ETH) training, a service provided by the US Department of Energy’s Better Plants program, offers a compelling solution. Although ETHs have traditionally focused on energy and cost savings, data indicate that ETHs can be used to identify opportunities to reduce emissions and water use and to support a sustainable and circular operation. These 3-day on-site events engage employees in a collaborative search for operational and maintenance efficiency improvement opportunities. The success of ETHs lies in a comprehensive methodology. Each phase in an ETH uses various tools and resources to empower employees to identify practical solutions. This study presents data from 13 ETHs conducted between 2023 and 2024 across diverse manufacturing subsectors in the United States and demonstrates that the events can help create a pragmatic decarbonization pathway. Through the events, a total of 234 energy and emissions reduction opportunities were identified, and the potential impact is significant. Implementing the recommendations could translate to annual savings of 497,299 MMBtu of energy, 64,374 kgal of water, and 4.85 million tCO 2 e of emissions. The fiscal savings from the proposed recommendations translate into nearly $\$$5 million annually. This study identifies the opportunities by energy system type and by the specific actions recommended, while also analyzing the identified opportunities, presenting the most established sustainability recommendations. Case studies from participating partners are presented to further demonstrate that ETHs provide a practical and impactful approach to reducing energy consumption, emissions, and operating costs and promote a more sustainable future for the industrial sector.

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗
DOE OSTI2023

A Self-Sustained CPS Design for Reliable Wildfire Monitoring

Continuous monitoring of areas nearby the electric grid is critical for preventing and early detection of devastating wildfires. Existing wildfire monitoring systems are intermittent and oblivious to local ambient risk factors, resulting in poor wildfire awareness. Ambient sensor suites deployed near the gridlines can increase the monitoring granularity and detection accuracy. However, these sensors must address two challenging and competing objectives at the same time. First, they must remain powered for years without manual maintenance due to their remote locations. Second, they must provide and transmit reliable information if and when a wildfire starts. The first objective requires aggressive energy savings and ambient energy harvesting, while the second requires continuous operation of a range of sensors. To the best of our knowledge, this paper presents the first self-sustained cyber-physical system that dynamically co-optimizes the wildfire detection accuracy and active time of sensors. The proposed approach employs reinforcement learning to train a policy that controls the sensor operations as a function of the environment (i.e., current sensor readings), harvested energy, and battery level. Here, the proposed cyber-physical system is evaluated extensively using real-life temperature, wind, and solar energy harvesting datasets and an open-source wildfire simulator. In long-term (5 years) evaluations, the proposed framework achieves 89% uptime, which is 46% higher than a carefully tuned heuristic approach. At the same time, it averages a 2-minute initial response time, which is at least 2.5× faster than the same heuristic approach. Furthermore, the policy network consumes 0.6 mJ per day on the TI CC2652R microcontroller using TensorFlow Lite for Micro, which is negligible compared to the daily sensor suite energy consumption.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2021

Blueprint for Integrating Grid-Interactive Efficient Building (GEB) Technologies into U.S. General Services Administration Performance Contracts

This document provides recommended strategies for increasing implementation of grid-interactive efficient building (GEB) measures in federal performance contracts. This document outlines distributed energy resource screening processes, contractual considerations for GEB technologies within performance contracts, and guidance for integration of GEB analysis procedures and technologies into each phase of a performance contract.

ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATION,↗
DOE OSTI2024

C2C Expert Match Technical Assistance: City of Reading, Pennsylvania [Slides]

The City of Reading, located in southeastern Pennsylvania, is the main city in the Greater Reading Area and the county seat of Berks County, with a population of approximately 95,112 as of 2020. Historically a disinvested manufacturing community, it has a poverty rate of around 40%, a housing stock averaging 90 years old, and an owner-occupied housing rate below 40%. In 2019, Reading adopted a resolution to achieve 100% renewable energy by 2050. The city aims to transition residential, small commercial, and small manufacturing sectors to renewable energy for electricity and heating, bypassing natural gas. This C2C Expert Match aimed to improve the energy efficiency and comfort of older rowhomes in Reading, which often rely on home heating oil and lack cooling systems. A representative energy model of a typical rowhome was developed to evaluate retrofit strategies focused on reducing overheating risk, as well as the potential impacts of heat pump installation. Additionally, resources such as case studies and best practices on energy efficiency, thermal resilience, and electrification retrofits were gathered to support the implementation of effective measures in the community.

29 ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY↗
DOE OSTI2021

The Technical and Economic Potential of Hydrogen within the United States

Hydrogen markets have an opportunity to grow as its value as an energy intermediate increases. Hydrogen’s estimated serviceable consumption potential in the United States is 106 MMT/yr which is a ten-fold increase over the current market size. That opportunity is driven primarily by increased demands for metals refining, biofuel and hydrocarbon production, supplementing the natural gas system, seasonal storage for the electricity grid, and fuel cell electric vehicles. The U.S. has many renewable, nuclear, and fossil resources that each could meet that demand itself. The economic potential, which considers both costs to produce hydrogen and willingness of applications to pay for it, is 22 to 41 MMT/yr. The range is impacted by factors that impact the cost to produce including the price of natural gas and the cost of electrolyzers. It is also impacted by competition to provide the same services as hydrogen including electrification.

electrolysis↗
DOE OSTI2024

Dynamic Modeling of Power Conversion Stages for an Exascale Supercomputer

In this paper a power conversion and energy consumption model for an exascale supercomputer is investigated. Power consumption, energy loss and efficiency are derived for the 27.2 MW liquid-cooled, centralized, High Performance Computing (HPC) power system, which is supplied directly from the 480 V three-phase mains. Two energy conversion stages are analyzed, measured and modeled. The model is developed in order to be adapted and implemented in a digital twin platform utilizing a Resource Allocator and Power Simulator (RAPS) module. RAPS enables estimation of potential energy savings in the direct AC power supply architecture via both conventional rectifier load sharing (commonly used in HPC systems), as well as smart rectifier load sharing. Moreover, besides the direct AC supply architecture analysis, the full direct DC supply architecture with with 1 kV DC bus were also studied. Comparison of 10 hour time frame operation of the system, with direct 480 V AC voltage supply with conventional and smart load sharing and medium dc voltage supply were done. For the direct AC supply architecture, with conventional and smart load sharing the predicted power loss was approximately 840 kW and 820 kW, respectively and the predicted total system efficiency was 92.87% and 93.05%, respectively. For the direct DC supply architecture with the 1000 V DC supply bus power loss was approximately 340 kW and the predicted total system efficiency was 97.02%.

Wojda, Rafal↗
DOE OSTI2025

Comparative life cycle assessment of various hydrogen pathways for cleaner methanol synthesis

This study evaluates the potential environmental impacts of e-methanol production using hydrogen from green, yellow, and blue sources, including Gas Switching Reforming for high purity hydrogen production with carbon capture (GSR-H 2 ), and compares their performance across current and renewable energy scenarios. Using a cradle-to-gate life cycle assessment (LCA), the study quantifies impacts across seven TRACI categories. Global warming potential (GWP) ranged from 0.28 kg CO 2 eq/kg MeOH for green hydrogen with renewables to 2.55 kg CO 2 eq/kg MeOH for SMR-CC under grid power. Among the scenarios, renewable electrolysis achieves the lowest GWP, while GSR-H 2 under renewable power offered the best balance of emissions reductions and resource efficiency among the fossil-based routes, offering a viable transitional solution in regions dependent on natural gas infrastructure. The study reveals GSR-H 2 's potential as an alternative to conventional steam methane reforming with carbon capture (SMR-CC), showing its advantages in carbon capture efficiency and reduced life cycle emissions as well as significantly lower water consumption. GSR-H 2 , when powered by renewables, consumed only 1.41 L of water per kg MeOH, an 82% reduction compared to grid-powered electrolysis, highlighting its potential in water-scarce regions. This study is the first to evaluate GSR-H 2 as a hydrogen source for e-methanol, providing new evidence for its role as a cleaner, scalable transitional solution aligned with cleaner production principles.

08 HYDROGEN↗
DOE OSTI2023

Analysis of hydrogen infrastructure for the feasibility, economics, and sustainability of a fuel cell powered data center

Data centers used for internet data services, cloud computing, and/or data storage consume vast amounts of electricity and are increasing rapidly in capacity. Consequently, their power consumption has raised concerns about energy sustainability and environmental impacts. Large-scale, on-site renewable energy could help reduce data centers’ carbon footprint; however, wind and solar power alone cannot provide an uninterrupted power supply to computer servers due to their natural variability. Instead, reliable power integration can be achieved by using fuel cells powered by hydrogen from sustainable resources (e.g., wind and solar energy). Establishing a hydrogen infrastructure will be critical for realizing these benefits and establishing fuel cells as a viable power source for data centers. Here, to facilitate the development of novel carbon-free fuel cell data enters, this paper presents renewable power integrated with hydrogen infrastructures in four scenarios to provide reliable hydrogen supply from production to storage. Various paths were analyzed toward a hydrogen supply infrastructure by determining the proper component sizes and calculating the cost of meeting the server load. We used a microgrid modeling software, Hybrid Optimization of Multiple Energy Resources (HOMER), and studied the feasibility of fuel cell powered data centers employing renewable hydrogen. The modeling results show various renewable integration configurations to meet reliable and sustainable power requirement under four scenarios for a carbon-free data center.

08 HYDROGEN↗
DOE OSTI2022

Developing a Power Plant Suitability Model for the Energy Zones Mapping Tool

This report provides an example of designing, developing, and running a power plant suitability model in the Energy Zones Mapping Tool (EZMT), a public, web-based mapping tool with a large spatial database focused on energy infrastructure, energy resources, and related siting factors. The example focuses on natural gas combined cycle (NGCC) power plants, which have several unique and interesting characteristics. NGCC plants typically provide peaking power to the electrical grid. Such plants can be started or stopped relatively quickly and are often used to supplement base load plants (such as nuclear or coal) during times of peak electrical consumption or to counterbalance lulls in variable power generation (such as wind or solar). Due to these and other factors, NGCC plants have been projected to increase in number under energy planning studies such as Hadley et al. The scope of the Hadley et. al. study is the Eastern Interconnection (EI), the electrical transmission grid serving much of the United States and Canada east of the Rocky Mountains. Results in the study are organized according to 22 Multi-region National—North American Electricity and Environment Model (NEEM) regions within the EI. NGCC plants usually have lower water requirements than other thermoelectric power plants they may replace; therefore, they are expected to have an interesting role in reducing the overall water requirements of energy generation.

20 FOSSIL-FUELED POWER PLANTS↗
NASA NTRS1997

Oxygen Production on Mars Using Solid Oxide Electrolysis

If oxygen for propulsion and life support needs were to be extracted from martian resources, significant savings in launch mass and costs could be attained for both manned and unmanned missions. In addition to reduced cost the ability to produce oxygen from martian resources would decrease the risks associated with long duration stays on the surface of Mars. One method of producing the oxygen from the carbon dioxide rich atmosphere of Mars involves solid oxide electrolysis. A brief summary of the theory of operation will be presented followed by a schematic description of a Mars oxygen production pland and a discussion of its power consumption characteristics.

Sridhar, K. R.↗
NASA NTRS2008

On Convergence of Development Costs and Cost Models for Complex Spaceflight Instrument Electronics

Development costs of a few recent spaceflight instrument electrical and electronics subsystems have diverged from respective heritage cost model predictions. The cost models used are Grass Roots, Price-H and Parametric Model. These cost models originated in the military and industry around 1970 and were successfully adopted and patched by NASA on a mission-by-mission basis for years. However, the complexity of new instruments recently changed rapidly by orders of magnitude. This is most obvious in the complexity of representative spaceflight instrument electronics' data system. It is now required to perform intermediate processing of digitized data apart from conventional processing of science phenomenon signals from multiple detectors. This involves on-board instrument formatting of computational operands from row data for example, images), multi-million operations per second on large volumes of data in reconfigurable hardware (in addition to processing on a general purpose imbedded or standalone instrument flight computer), as well as making decisions for on-board system adaptation and resource reconfiguration. The instrument data system is now tasked to perform more functions, such as forming packets and instrument-level data compression of more than one data stream, which are traditionally performed by the spacecraft command and data handling system. It is furthermore required that the electronics box for new complex instruments is developed for one-digit watt power consumption, small size and that it is light-weight, and delivers super-computing capabilities. The conflict between the actual development cost of newer complex instruments and its electronics components' heritage cost model predictions seems to be irreconcilable. This conflict and an approach to its resolution are addressed in this paper by determining the complexity parameters, complexity index, and their use in enhanced cost model.

Kizhner, Semion↗