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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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At least 73 records · Page 4
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
DOE OSTI2022

Customer trust in their utility company and interest in household-level battery storage

Here we seek to contribute to understanding household interest in battery storage, particularly the role of customer trust in their utility company. Using data from a survey of California households, we examine whether customers’ trust in their utility company is associated with their interest in battery storage. We find that customer trust that their utility company acts in their best interest is associated with lower levels of interest. Trust that the utility company is competent has some effect. Perceptions that battery storage has financial and environmental benefits and low nonmonetary costs are also associated with higher levels of interest.

29 ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY↗
DOE OSTI2024

Customer enrollment and participation in building demand management programs: A review of key factors

Increasing the efficiency and flexibility of electricity demand is necessary for ensuring a cost-effective and reliable transition to zero-carbon electricity systems. Such demand-side management (DSM) resources have been procured by utilities for decades via energy efficiency and demand response programs; however, the key drivers of program enrollment and customer participation levels remain poorly understood — even as governments and grid planners seek to scale up the deployment of DSM assets to meet climate targets. Here we systematically review the evidence on multiple factors that may influence customer enrollment and participation in building DSM programs, focusing primarily on residential and commercial buildings. We examine the contexts in which relationships between DSM factors and outcomes are most often explored and with which methods; we also score the strength, direction, and internal consistency of each factor's reported impact on the enrollment and participation outcomes. We find that studies most commonly assess the effects of economic incentives for load flexibility on program participation levels, often using simulation-based methods in lieu of measured data. Few studies focus on program enrollment outcomes or regulatory drivers of either enrollment or participation, and gaps are also evident in the coverage of emerging DSM opportunities like load electrification. Removal of structural barriers (e.g., the lack of controls infrastructure) and the use of third party services (e.g., load aggregators) are the factors with the largest positive impacts on DSM outcomes, but no single factor emerges as clearly most impactful. For a given factor, the range of reported impacts typically varies widely across the relevant studies reviewed. Our findings provide a snapshot of the state of knowledge about building DSM and customer decision-making, and they expose key gaps in understanding that must be filled if building DSM is to expand as a critical resource for operating clean power grids.

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗
DOE OSTI2018

Are vulnerable customers any different than their peers when exposed to critical peak pricing: Evidence from the U.S.

Recent broad-based deployment of Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) enables the opportunity for broader adoption of time-based rates, and the benefits that result have been sizable contributors to making the investments cost effective. However, some stakeholders have raised concerns about the assumptions underlying the benefits assessments in AMI business cases. Such concerns are especially acute for certain subpopulations of residential customers. Low income, elderly and chronically ill (i.e., vulnerable) customers are believed to have less load that can be shifted or reduced to capture bill savings, lack the know-how or wherewithal with which to curtail usage, likely have more limited financial resources which may compel them to avoid high priced periods by reducing electricity for essential usage potentially causing them physical harm, and more generally may be more adversely affected by higher bills, which might possibly result from certain forms of time-based rates. There is very limited existing literature that addresses these questions specifically with regard to vulnerable subpopulations. This paper, based on a larger report, extends the existing empirical literature on the experiences of low-income customers exposed to critical peak pricing, and provides the first glimpses into the experiences of the elderly and those who reported being chronically ill.

29 ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY↗
DOE OSTI2022

Quantum state preparation by adiabatic evolution with custom gates

Quantum state preparation by adiabatic evolution is currently rendered ineffective by the long implementation times of the underlying quantum circuits, comparable to the decoherence time of present and near-term quantum devices. These implementation times can be significantly reduced by realizing these circuits with custom gates. Using classical computing, we model the output of a realistic two-qubit processor implementing the adiabatic evolution of a two-spin system by means of custom gates. This modeled output is then compared with the results of quantum simulations solving the same problem on IBM Quantum (IBMQ) systems. Additionally, when used to emulate the behavior of the IBMQ quantum circuit, our realistic model yields state fidelities ranging from 65% to 85%, similar to the actual performance of a diverse set of IBMQ devices. When we reduced the implementation time by using custom gates, however, the loss of fidelity was reduced by at least a factor of 4, allowing us to accurately extract the energy of the target state. This improvement is enough to render adiabatic evolution useful for quantum state preparation for small systems or as a preconditioner for other state preparation methods.

73 NUCLEAR PHYSICS AND RADIATION PHYSICS↗
DOE OSTI2023

Distributed Energy Resource Management Systems: Preserving Customer Privacy through K-Anonymity

The smart grid represents the next generation of electricity distribution systems that utilizes recent technological innovations. It uses digital communication between its components and entities to attain more automation, self-sufficiency, and reliability. One of the many concerns in smart grid digital communication discussions is the possibility of violating customers’ privacy. Violating customers’ privacy imposes a significant barrier as smart grid desirable attributes are tightly tied to customers’ participation. Employing privacy models can address concerns regarding information privacy in smart grid digital communication. In this work, we provide an approach to utilizing K-anonymity to ensure data within the system excludes Personally Identifiable Information. Results suggest that a dynamically generated generalization hierarchy minimizes information loss incurred by the anonymization process.

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗
DOE OSTI2024

A Comprehensive Model for Analyzing the Effects of Power Outages on Customers

Power outages can cause significant inconveniences to critical services and substantial economic losses. Therefore, it is crucial to systematically analyze the impact on customers during power outages caused by various factors, such as severe thunderstorms, floods, vegetation, or mechanical problems, and to plan for reliable operation and control under such events. Power outages in different locations may exhibit varying characteristics regarding customer impact. In this paper, we present a mathematical model that captures the essential characteristics of customer impact during power outages. The parameters of our model include impact duration, recovery duration, maximum impact level, increase curve parameter, and decrease curve parameter. We demonstrate how historical power outage data can be fitted to our model, enabling a systematic comparison of outages caused by different factors in various locations.

Lee, Sangkeun (Matt) [ORNL] (ORCID:000000021317511↗
DOE OSTI2018

American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009: Final Report on Customer Acceptance, Retention, and Response to Time-Based Rates from Consumer Behavior Studies

Time-based rate programs, enabled by utility investments in advanced metering infrastructure (AMI), are increasingly being considered by utilities as tools to reduce peak demand and enable customers to better manage consumption and costs. Under the Smart Grid Investment Grant Program (SGIG), the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) partnered with several electric utilities to conduct consumer behavior studies (CBS). The goals involved applying randomized and controlled experimental designs for estimating customer responses more precisely and credibly to advance understanding of time-based rates and customer systems, and provide new information for improving program designs, implementation strategies, and evaluations. The intent was to produce more robust and credible analysis of impacts, costs, benefits, and lessons learned and assist utility and regulatory decision makers in evaluating investment opportunities involving time-based rates.

29 ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY↗
DOE OSTI2019

Implications of Rate Design for the Customer-Economics of Behind-the-Meter Storage

This work provides insights for the two main sources of bill savings for residential and commercial customers – demand charge reductions and arbitrage of energy charges – considering a range of customer profiles and retail rate designs. Storage can reduce monthly demand charges, which are dependent on the customer’s billing demand in kW rather than the amount of energy they consume in kWh, by charging during times of low energy consumption and discharging during peak consumption hours, thereby reducing peak power consumption from the grid. Storage can also reduce electricity bills by charging the storage during low-priced hours and discharging during high-priced hours, taking advantage of price-differentials of time-varying rates. This study considers a variety of demand charge designs and rates that allow for energy arbitrage.

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗
DOE OSTI2019

Design and Development of a Custom Laser Powder Bed Fusion System

Additive manufacturing (AM) has gained great momentum both in industrial and research applications. Due to the ability to create custom and complex parts directly from a computer-aided design (CAD) file, AM is becoming a more reliable and efficient means to fabricate components. While being implemented throughout the aerospace, medical, automotive, and energy industries, the development of metal AM is still ongoing and presents many unique scientific challenges. For example, in laser powder bed fusion (PBF), intense localized heating of metal powder followed by rapid cooling leads to residual stresses and unique microstructures within a build. This may lead to cracking and a decrease in mechanical performance. In-situ diagnostics enable the laser-material interaction to be monitored as it occurs in order to optimize process parameters, and can be leveraged to develop tailored materials with specific microstructures that are more conducive for the complex thermal patterns encountered during laser PBF. Unfortunately, most commercial laser PBF machines are not suitable for research applications due to their large size, lack of diagnostics, and black box operation. A smaller system is better suited for using smaller quantities of powder to develop new tailored materials for AM, and a custom, modular design permits greater flexibility for incorporating in-situ diagnostics. Therefore, this project consisted of the design and construction of a custom, small scale, modular PBF system.

36 MATERIALS SCIENCE↗
DOE OSTI2019

HR-ITS Customer Service Agreement (FY 2020)

Document intended for training purposes. The purpose of this Customer Service Agreement (CSA) is to formalize the agreement between HR-ITS and a customer who requires services. This agreement describes the specific services to be provided by HR-ITS and the costs that the customer agrees to pay for such services.

96 KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT AND PRESERVATION↗
DOE OSTI2020

Validation of RU-WRF, the Custom Atmospheric Mesoscale Model of the Rutgers Center for Ocean Observing Leadership

The Rutgers University Center for Ocean Observing Leadership (RU-COOL) contracted the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) to evaluate RU-COOL's atmospheric observation and modeling capabilities for characterizing the New Jersey offshore wind resource. The observational network used by RU-COOL consists of mostly public but some private coastal and offshore buoy-based stations. The core wind resource modeling capability of RU-COOL is a custom setup of the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) mesoscale model, referred to in this report as RU-WRF. The most unique feature of RU-WRF and not found in other WRF model setups is the use of custom sea surface temperature (SST) product generated by RU-COOL. This custom product was designed to better capture the unique coastal upwelling and strong storm mixing in the Mid-Atlantic Bight, which other typical SST products are not designed to capture. Funding for the development, maintenance, and use of RU-WRF by RU-COOL is provided by the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities, who also funded the validation work presented in this report. In this validation study, NREL was specifically tasked to: 1) Assess the observational network used by RU-COOL to validate RU-WRF and make recommendations for improvement, 2) Assess methods used by RU-COOL to validate RU-WRF and make recommendations for improvement, 3) Examine the inputs to and setup within RU-WRF, compare against available NREL data sets, and make recommendations for improvement.

17 WIND ENERGY↗
DOE OSTI2021

Performance of solar leasing for low- and middle-income customers in Connecticut

Policymakers are increasingly interested in expanding access to rooftop photovoltaic systems. This study analyzes the financial performance of a Connecticut Green Bank (CGB) solar leasing program, run in partnership with PosiGen, that targets low- and moderate-income customers. We show that this program has successfully reached underserved customers and has reasonable repayment rates given the credit characteristics of the participants. The CGB/PosiGen program reaches many more underserved customers than other PV financing programs in Connecticut.For example, the majority of CGB/PosiGen participants (58%) live in census tracts that have a median income of less than 80% of the area median income (AMI). In contrast, only 9% of participants in the other CGB solar financing programs live in these census tracts. Furthermore, the majority of CGB/PosiGen participants (56%) have FICO scores that would generally be considered non-prime (<670), whereas only 2% of participants in the other programs have similarly low scores. Credit, not income, is the primary factor that explains participants’ financial performance. Overall, we find that delinquency and annualized losses are higher for PosiGen (2.3% and 0.9%) than for other CGB programs (1.4% and 0.1%). Across the CGB programs, lower credit scores are associated with higher rates of delinquency and loss. Therefore, participants’ lower credit scores explain much of the program’s higher rates of delinquency and annualized losses. PosiGen leases perform competitively with market-rate solar and non-solar leases and loans. When compared to securities backed by market-rate PV loans and leases with similar amounts of seasoning, we find that the PosiGen leases have higher delinquency rates but comparable gross loss rates. The similarity in losses is notable given that loss rates for PosiGen leases were higher than those of the other CGB leases and loans. Rather than the PosiGen leases having high loss rates, other CGB leases and loans have unusually low loss rates. We also compare PosiGen to non-solar benchmarks, including indices of auto and consumer loans. We find that the PosiGen leases have significantly less delinquency than non-prime auto loans and have performance comparable to many consumer loans. The U.S. Department of Energy’s Solar Energy Technologies Office supported this research.

14 SOLAR ENERGY↗
DOE OSTI2021

Who is participating in residential energy efficiency programs? Exploring demographic and other household characteristics of participants in utility customer-funded energy efficiency programs

In addition to benefiting all customers by reducing the total electric system cost, utility customer-funded energy efficiency programs provide direct benefits to the participants. Understanding the current demographic and household characteristics of participants will help assess the extent of inequities in program participation and figure out what characteristics need to be targeted to achieve equitable outcomes. This report describes how 11 demographic and household characteristics including income, race and ethnicity, and education affect participation in residential utility customer-funded energy efficiency programs. It compiles previous work on this topic and adds new primary analysis of four datasets with different levels of detail from the Residential Energy Consumption Survey (RECS), two New England states, and a Midwestern state.

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗
DOE OSTI2024

High-Throughput Custom Monitoring for the Mu2e TDAQ System

In this project we are studying the application of programmable network hardware to provide a custom monitoring capability for the Mu2e Trigger and Data Acquisition System (TDAQ) system. The goal of the Mu2e experiment is to search for a charged-lepton flavor violating processes where a negative muon converts into an electron in the field of an aluminum nucleus. This experiment is intended to improve by four orders of magnitude the search sensitivity reached so far. We have a working prototype of a system that provides high-throughput, custom monitoring for the Mu2e TDAQ system. The custom Mu2e network packet header format is parsed as it crosses the network switch. Parsing extracts bits that convey information about error states at read-out controllers (ROCs). This information is periodically relayed to the switch controller, which in turn alerts experiment operators.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗
NASA NTRS1976

Thermal performance of a customized multilayer insulation (MLI)

The thermal performance of a LH2 tank on a shroudless vehicle was investigated. The 1.52 m (60 in) tank was insulated with 2 MLI blankets consisting of 18 double aluminized Mylar radiation shields and 19 silk net spacers. The temperature of outer space was simulated by using a cryoshroud which was maintained at near liquid hydrogen temperature. The heating effects of a payload were simulated by utilizing a thermal payload simulator (TPS) viewing the tank. The test program consisted of three major test categories: (1) null testing, (2) thermal performance testing of the tank installed MLI system, and (3) thermal testing of a customized MLI configuration. TPS surface temperatures during the null test were maintained at near hydrogen temperature and during test categories 2 and 3 at 289 K (520R). The heat flow rate through the tank installed MLI at a tank/TPS spacing of 0.457 m was 1.204 watts with no MLI on the TPS and 0.059 watts through the customized MLI with three blankets on the TPS. Reducing the tank/TPS spacing from 0.457 m to 0.152 m the heat flow through the customized MLI increased by 10 percent.

Leonhard, K. E.↗
NASA NTRS1985

Throughput comparison of microscope objectives and custom lenses for laser diode output beam collimation

The efficiency with which microscope objectives and custom lenses collimate laser diode emission was measured. Four microscope objectives of 10, 21, 45, and 60 power and two custom lenses of 1 and 0.8 power were used. An autocollimator system was used to measure throughput. It consisted of 1 m focal length lens, a 10 power microscope objective, and a 128-element G series Reticon linear array. Collimating throughput efficiency was defined as the ratio of measured collimated power to total laser output power. Two throughput efficiencies were obtained: one for the didoe operation below lasing and the other for the diode operation above lasing. The custom lenses had higher throughput efficiencies than the microscope objectives. The f/0.8 system provided better throughput efficiencies than the f/1.0 system.

Fuhr, P. L.↗
NASA NTRS1987

Customer concerns regarding satellite servicing

The organization of orbital servicing of satellites is discussed. Provision of servicing equipment; design interfaces between the satellite and the servicing equipment; and the economic viability of the concept are discussed. The proposed solution for satisfying customer concerns is for the servicing organizations to baseline an adequate inventory of servicing equipment with standard interfaces and established servicing costs. With this knowledge, the customer can conduct tradeoff studies and make programmatic decisions regarding servicing options. A dialog procedure between customers and servicing specialists is outlined.

Rysavy, Gordon↗
NASA NTRS2009

Customer Communication Document

This procedure communicates to the Customers of the Automation, Robotics and Simulation Division (AR&SD) Dynamics Systems Test Branch (DSTB) how to obtain services of the Six-Degrees-Of-Freedom Dynamic Test System (SDTS). The scope includes the major communication documents between the SDTS and its Customer. It established the initial communication and contact points as well as provides the initial documentation in electronic media for the customer. Contact the SDTS Manager (SM) for the names of numbers of the current contact points.

Source record↗