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At least 721 records · Page 40

A new redback pulsar candidate 4FGL J2054.2+6904

ABSTRACT The Fermi catalogue contains about 2000 unassociated γ-ray sources. Some of them were recently identified as pulsars, including so-called redbacks and black widows, which are millisecond pulsars in tight binary systems with non- and partially-degenerate low-mass stellar companions irradiated by the pulsar wind. We study a likely optical and X-ray counterpart of the Fermi source 4FGL J2054.2+6904 proposed earlier as a pulsar candidate. We use archival optical data as well as Swift/XRT and SRG/eROSITA X-ray data to clarify its nature. Using Zwicky Transient Facility data in g and r bands spanning over 4.7 yr, we find a period of ≈7.5 h. The folded light curve has a smooth sinusoidal shape with the peak-to-peak amplitude of ≈0.4 mag. The spectral fit to the optical spectral energy distribution of the counterpart candidate gives the star radius of 0.5 ± 0.1 R⊙ and temperature of 5500 ± 300 K implying a G2–G9-type star. Its X-ray spectrum is well fitted by an absorbed power law with the photon index of 1.0 ± 0.3 and unabsorbed flux of ≈2 × 10−13 erg s−1 cm−2. All the properties of 4FGL J2054.2+6904 and its presumed counterpart suggest that it is a member of the redback family.

Karpova, A. V. (ORCID:0000000242115856)↗

Deployment Potential of Concentrating Solar Power Technologies in California

As states within the United States respond to future grid development goals, there is a growing demand for reliable and resilient nighttime generation that can be addressed by low-cost, long-duration energy storage solutions. This report studies the potential of including concentrating solar power (CSP) in the technology mix to support California’s goals as defined in Senate Bill 100. A joint agency report study that determined potential pathways to achieve the renewable portfolio standard set by the bill did not include CSP, and our work provides information that could be used as a follow-up. This study uses a capacity expansion model configured to have nodal spatial fidelity in California and balancing-area fidelity in the Western Interconnection outside of California. The authors discovered that by applying current technology cost projections CSP fulfills nearly 15% of the annual load while representing just 6% of total installed capacity in 2045, replacing approximately 30 GWe of wind, solar PV, and standalone batteries compared to a scenario without CSP included. The deployment of CSP in the results is sensitive to the technology’s cost, which highlights the importance of meeting cost targets in 2030 and beyond to enable the technology’s potential contribution to California’s carbon reduction goals.

14 SOLAR ENERGY↗

Main Bearing Replacement and Damage - A Field Data Study on 15 Gigawatts of Wind Energy Capacity

This study seeks to establish a comprehensive baseline of knowledge for the replacement and damage of main bearings in wind turbines. The purpose of this report is to provide a high-level summary of the data set, methodology, and results of this work. Full technical details and an extended analysis will be made available in a future publication. We collected data on main bearing replacements and reported damage from industrial partners based in Europe and the United States. In total, we obtained data for 167 wind power plants, with a combined capacity of 15.3 gigawatts (GW). Most of the data set was comprised of land-based, three-point mount, spherical roller bearings. Within this data set were 689 instances of main bearing replacement. Analysis was undertaken in two parts: first, a statistical analysis of the main bearing time-to-replacement data using survival analysis techniques; second, quantitative and qualitative analyses of the obtained damage information. Our results showed that 10% of a fixed main bearing population would be expected to have been replaced by 10.5 years. This is close to half of the 20-year design value. Fitted parametric distributions then indicated that by year 20, between 22% and 25% of main bearings are expected to have been replaced. Analysis of the damage reports revealed spalling to be the main type of damage listed. The additional presence of surface damage in the collected data indicates that at least part of the spalling cases are likely due to surface-initiated rolling contact fatigue. At this stage is not clear what proportion of spalling cases result from "wear induced", surface-initiated and subsurface-initiated rolling contact fatigue. While this work provides important insights into the current state of main bearing replacements and damage, many questions remain. An ongoing and expanding data collection and analysis effort focused on wind turbine main bearings is therefore recommended.

17 WIND ENERGY↗

A method for assessing economic, environmental, and reliability tradeoffs of interregional transmission connecting ERCOT (the Texas grid) to the eastern and western grids

Reliable development of the power grid is an evolving concern for humanity due to extreme weather that frequently threatens power sector infrastructure. The state of Texas is a uniquely structured testbed for grid planners to study when looking for solutions to development, innovation, and overcoming such challenges. Because of its size and islanded structure, Texas is small enough to model, but big enough to matter. Texas is a global leader in energy production, energy consumption, and maintains an unusually diverse fuel mix. In addition, the state has experienced winter freezes, heat waves, wind storms, droughts and floods that have threatened power sector infrastructure or caused recent blackouts and calls for demand side conservation. One of the most devastating of these events was the North American winter storm, dubbed “Winter Storm Uri” by the Weather Channel, that froze the region in February 2021 and led to an extended power outage event that put the majority of Texan residents in darkness for days. While preparing to avoid such outage events in the future, various tools have been proposed to improve grid reliability, including energy efficiency, demand response, and distributed energy resources. An additional option would be to develop interregional transmission that connects the Texas grid to other national grids. To assess the merits of this idea, we developed a novel, universally-applicable and internationally-relevant framework to study how the Texas grid would evolve alongside access to various interregional ties. This method allows us to stress the synthetic grid structure and analyze how it would respond to the shock of a simulated winter storm event. Our method leverages open-source modeling tools, such as PowerGenome, pyGRETA, and GenX to synthesize unique zonal grid data, construct a consolidated network of model regions, and simulate different developmental pathways of capacity expansion and operational dispatch. We demonstrate our method with an analysis connecting the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), the grid that serves most of Texas, the Western Electricity Coordinating Council (WECC), the grid that serves the western half of the contiguous U.S., and the Eastern Interconnect, the grid that serves the eastern half of the contiguous U.S. Our results indicate that the cost-optimal capacity of interregional transmission connecting the ERCOT grid to other grids lies between 9–13 GW assuming baseline conditions. Building this amount of connecting capacity in one or multiple directions lowers the costs and emissions of development and operation by up to $16 billion and 257 million metric tonnes (MMT) respectively. Additionally, our results show that the interregional connections between ERCOT and other national grids reduce the amount of total load shed required through mild winter storm events. However, our results also show that there is a threshold of very extreme winter storm conditions, spanning multiple service areas, above which the connections exacerbate resource adequacy problems. Therefore, the results indicate that the connections need to be carefully planned alongside the rest of the grid infrastructure to avoid over-reliance on specific resources or technology options.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗

Wake steering of multirotor wind turbines

Abstract In this paper, wake steering is applied to multirotor turbines to determine whether it has the potential to reduce wind plant wake losses. Through application of rotor yaw to multirotor turbines, a new degree of freedom is introduced to wind farm control such that wakes can be expanded, channelled or redirected to improve inflow conditions for downstream turbines. Five different yaw configurations are investigated (including a baseline case) by employing large‐eddy simulations (LES) to generate a detailed representation of the velocity field downwind of a multirotor wind turbine. Two lower‐fidelity models from single‐rotor yaw studies (curled‐wake model and analytical Gaussian wake model) are extended to the multirotor case, and their results are compared with the LES data. For each model, the wake is analysed primarily by examining wake cross‐sections at different downwind distances. Further quantitative analysis is carried out through characterisations of wake centroids and widths over a range of streamwise locations and through a brief analysis of power production. Most significantly, it is shown that rotor yaw can have a considerable impact on both the distribution and magnitude of the wake velocity deficit, leading to power gains for downstream turbines. The lower‐fidelity models show small deviation from the LES results for specific configurations; however, both are able to reasonably capture the wake trends over a large streamwise range.

17 WIND ENERGY↗

Emerging Energy Market Analysis Initiative, Methodological Framework

Planning and operations of the electric power sector are undergoing radical changes. Climate change mitigation efforts have forced rapid changes to the technology mix. Technologies like wind and solar have experienced rapid growth, while investment in fossil sources has peaked or is declining. These foundational changes are forcing changes to energy systems. Demand-side adoption of electrified technologies, including electric vehicles, is changing load profiles and opening up new avenues for consumer participation in the power systems. The implications of an evolving power system pertain to more than environmental and technical dimensions. Changes to the generation mix and its consequent upstream and downstream impacts such as fuel production have significant and highly concentrated consequences on economies and employment. Shifts towards distributed (or decentralized) generating assets offer the potential to reshape economic and employment opportunities associated with the energy sector across space and socioeconomic groups. The Emerging Energy Market Analysis (EMA) initiative aims to identify sustainable, regionally acceptable, and high-value energy solutions that are secure and equitable. Unlike short-term, least-cost choices that can narrowly account for traditional options, EMA’s focus on emerging energy markets recognizes that new or adapted practices and technologies can alter the frontier of solutions and advance a community’s social, economic, and natural pathways. Such change requires a more comprehensive analysis of societal input, resources, capabilities, and infrastructure. These considerations lay the foundation for community decision-making models that are responsive to community values as well as the history and drivers. The result is a community-based decision and engagement model that will be valuable to decisionmakers and developers of advanced and emerging energy solutions, seeking a social license to operate prior to project development.

21 SPECIFIC NUCLEAR REACTORS AND ASSOCIATED PLANTS↗

Planar Transformer With Asymmetric Integrated Leakage Inductance Using Horizontal Air Gap

This article presents a novel planar-based transformer winding and core structure with controllable leakage inductance generation for integrated magnetics applications. As a result of limitations in integrated magnetics from the literature, a new approach is proposed utilizing semi-interleaved windings and controllable leakage via a leakage flux core leg featuring a horizontal air gap. Here, the proposed transformer design is analyzed via detailed reluctance modeling to determine closed-form equations for the magnetizing and asymmetrically distributed leakage inductances. Next, a genetic-algorithm-based multiobjective design optimization problem is developed, seeking to minimize the core and winding losses of the proposed transformer subject to a set of parametric and geometric constraints in a dc-ac dual-active-bridge topology for microinverter applications. The optimization was extended to include other integrated magnetic structures from the literature, where it is determined that the proposed transformer is superior from the perspectives of efficiency, footprint area, and parasitic capacitance. Based on the results of the optimization analysis, two designs with theoretical transformer California Energy Commission (CEC) efficiency drops (i.e., CEC efficiency reduction specifically due to the transformer loss mechanisms) of 1.19% and 0.83% were fabricated and evaluated for electrical and thermal performance in the proposed 40 V, 400 W microinverter.

42 ENGINEERING↗

Forecasts for Land-Based Wind Deployment in the United States: Wind Industry Survey Results [Slides]

Recent land-based wind deployment in the United States has been sluggish, and expectations for future growth have moderated in recent years. Berkeley Lab conducted a brief survey of wind industry stakeholders to better understand barriers and solutions. The focus of the survey was on land-based wind projects in the United States – not offshore wind or distributed small wind projects. Respondents identified challenges related to the grid and to siting as the most pressing concerns.

17 WIND ENERGY↗

The Eel Pulsar Wind Nebula: A PeVatron-candidate Origin for HAWC J1826-128 and HESS J182-130

HAWC J1826–128 is one of the brightest Galactic TeV γ-ray sources detected by the High Altitude Water Cherenkov (HAWC) observatory, with photon energies extending up to nearly ~100 TeV. This HAWC source spatially coincides with the H.E.S.S. TeV source HESS J1826–130 and the "Eel" pulsar wind nebula (PWN), which is associated with the GeV pulsar PSR J1826–1256. In the X-ray band, Chandra and XMM-Newton revealed that the Eel PWN is composed of both a compact nebula (~15'') and diffuse X-ray emission (~6' × 2') extending away from the pulsar. Our NuSTAR observation detected hard X-ray emission from the compact PWN up to ~20 keV and evidence of the synchrotron burn-off effect. In addition to the spatial coincidence between HESS J1826–130 and the diffuse X-ray PWN, our multiwavelength spectral energy distribution (SED) analysis using X-ray and γ-ray data establishes a leptonic origin of the TeV emission associated with the Eel PWN. Furthermore, our evolutionary PWN SED model suggests (1) a low PWN B-field of ~1 μG, (2) a significantly younger pulsar age (t ~ 5.7 kyr) than the characteristic age (τ = 14.4 kyr), and (3) a maximum electron energy of ${E}_{\max }=2$ PeV. The low B-field, as well as the putative supersonic motion of the pulsar, may account for the asymmetric morphology of the diffuse X-ray emission. Our results suggest that the Eel PWN may be a leptonic PeVatron particle accelerator powered by the ~6 kyr old pulsar PSR J1826–1256 with a spin-down power of 3.6 × 10 36 erg s –1 .

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗

Land-based wind plant wake characterization using dual-Doppler radar measurements at AWAKEN

Wind plant wakes have been shown to persist for tens of kilometers downstream in offshore environments, reducing the power output of neighboring plants, but their behavior on land remains relatively unexplored through observation. This study capitalizes on the unique and extensive field data collected for the American WAKE ExperimeNt (AWAKEN) project underway in northern Oklahoma. X-band dual-Doppler radars deployed at this site measure wind speed and direction at 25-m and 2-min resolution within a 30-km range, capturing the interactions between three neighboring wind plants. These measurements show that the wake of one wind plant extends at least 15 km downstream under easterly wind and stable atmospheric conditions. Though the wake wind speed increases within the first 10 km, it plateaus at 90% of the freestream wind speed. The spanwise velocity distribution within the wake initially shows the clear signature of the wind plant layout, which is smoothed as it propagates downstream, indicating spanwise momentum transfer is a key mechanism in wind plant wake development and recovery. These findings have important implications for wind plant siting decisions and resource assessments, and provide insights into atmospheric interactions at the wind plant scale.

17 WIND ENERGY↗

Data efficiency assessment of generative adversarial networks in energy applications

This study investigates the data requirements of generative artificial intelligence (AI), particularly generative adversarial networks (GANs), for reliable data augmentation in energy applications. Generative AI, though seen as a solution to data limitations, requires substantial data to learn meaningful distributions—a challenge often overlooked. This study addresses the challenge through synthetic data generation for critical heat flux (CHF) and power grid demand, focusing on renewable and nuclear energy. Two variants of GAN employed are conditional GAN (cGAN) and Wasserstein GAN (wGAN). Our findings include the strong dependency of GAN on data size, with performance declining on smaller datasets and varying performance when generalizing to unseen experiments. Mass flux and heated length significantly influence CHF predictions. wGAN is more robust to feature exclusion, making it suitable for constrained synthetic data generation. In energy demand forecasting, wGAN performed well for solar, wind, and load predictions. Longer lookback hours and larger datasets improved predictions, especially for load power. Seasonal variations posed challenges, with wGAN achieving a relatively high error of Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE) of 0.32 for load power prediction, compared to RMSE of 0.07 under same-season conditions. Feature exclusions impacted cGAN the most, while wGAN showed greater robustness. This study concludes that, while generative AI is effective for data augmentation, it requires substantial data and careful training to generate realistic synthetic data and generalize to new experiments in engineering applications.

22 - GENERAL STUDIES OF NUCLEAR REACTORS↗

A Framework for Assessing Economic and Environmental Trade-offs of Internalized Emission Costs in ERCOT Grid Planning

The power grid is on the cusp of a massive transition driven by three major areas: 1) the growth in demand for electricity, 2) efforts to decarbonize the United States economy, and 3) a desire to mitigate social disparities from the impact of electricity generation on local populations. However, most studies of the electricity sector do not include equity impacts in their models. This study seeks to do so by developing a comprehensive and generalizable model tailored to the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) grid, designed to incorporate the equity impacts of electricity generation in a decarbonized and resilient framework. To integrate equity into our research, we incorporate environmental externalities into our capacity expansion model of ERCOT. Specifically, we factor in intermediate-level local marginal damages of precursor pollutants (NH3, NOx, primary PM2.5, SO2, and VOC) and global pollutant CO2 into the cost of generating electricity. We do this by taking into account county population, county ambient pollution concentration, and generator emission rates. Leveraging open-source modeling tools, such as PowerGenome, pyGRETA, and GenX we construct a county-level model to account for these costs. We integrate these marginal damages into the variable operations and maintenance costs of generators, for both existing and potential future builds. This study’s findings suggest that the value of a dynamic social cost of carbon (SSC) will cover criteria pollutant marginal damages within the ERCOT grid and solar and wind is expected to increase out to 2035. Key metrics evaluated within this research include fuel mix distribution across technologies, transmission and grid infrastructure costs, CO2 emissions, local pollutants marginal damages, and the variation in generation capacity built by the model. These results and framework can be used to support grid decisions that explicitly include distributional and procedural equity within a decarbonized and sustainable grid framework.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗

Transition of Large-Scale Environmental Conditions and Characteristics of Four Rainfall Types Observed by S-PolKa During the MJO-1 Active Phase of DYNAMO/CINDY/AMIE

Analyses of National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) S-PolKa dual-polarization radar data and ERA5 reanalysis fields indicate gradual changes in convection characteristics and large-scale environmental conditions during a central Indian Ocean Madden-Julian Oscillation (MJO) event observed by the DYNAMO/CINDY/AMIE field campaigns in late October 2011 (MJO-1). Examination of four rainfall types (isolated convective cores, convective, mixed, and stratiform) reveals a transition of convection characteristics (i.e., areal coverage and depth) between distinct 5-day environmental periods at the beginning and end of this ~2-week MJO active phase. A shift toward less frequent rainfall covering less of the radar domain for all four rainfall types occurs when large-scale lower-tropospheric dry air advects into the region with the westerly wind burst (WWB). Drier and warmer lower-free-tropospheric conditions associated with the WWB contribute to increased large-scale surface-based convective inhibition (CIN), surface-based convective available potential energy (CAPE), and cloud base heights. A thermodynamic budget analysis indicates reduced surface heat fluxes contribute to the increased surface-based CAPE. Greater CAPE at the end of MJO-1 coincides with deeper 50-dBZ convective echoes, while decreased 10-dBZ depth for all rainfall types corresponds in time with WWB-related dry-air advection. Increased (decreased) reflectivity values in the lower-level vertical reflectivity distribution of convective (stratiform) precipitation indicate increased (decreased) convective (stratiform) intensities when the WWB is present. The opposite depth changes for convective echoes and opposite shifts in convective and stratiform precipitation intensities underscore how the WWB can have differing impacts at different reflectivity thresholds and stages of the deep convection lifecycle.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

Power Electronics as an Enabler of the Current and Future Grid: Control Instead of Copper

Power electronics are becoming more pervasive in the power system. Solar, wind and battery energy storage systems regularly connect to the grid using power electronic interfaces. Loads are also increasingly power electronic-based. These changes, coupled with the change in the power system's operating characteristics as more and more renewable energy is integrated into the power system, offer a challenge to power electronic and power system engineers alike - how do we design and operate the power system moving forward?

direct connect↗

Ultra-Short-Term Spatiotemporal Forecasting of Renewable Resources: An Attention Temporal Convolutional Network Based Approach

The rapid increase in the penetration of renewable energy resources characterized by high variability and uncertainty is bringing new challenges to the power system operation. To ensure the efficient and reliable operation of electric grid, an accurate and general short-term forecasting algorithm with interpretability is desired. Moreover, the extensive off-site information provided by the proliferation of new renewable plants stimulates the interests in the spatiotemporal forecasting. In this paper, an attention temporal convolutional network, which is built on stacked dilated causal convolutional networks and attention mechanisms, is proposed to perform the ultra-short-term spatiotemporal forecasting of renewable resources. Compared with the existing spatiotemporal forecasting methods, the presented model needs no domain knowledge and can be applied to different forecasting tasks such as solar generation and wind speed forecasting. Here, the attention mechanism improves the interpretability. The algorithm can be used to produce both point and probabilistic forecasts. Numerical results on the data sets from National Renewable Energy Laboratory show superior performance over five baselines, in terms of skill scores. Compared with the baselines, the average improvements of accuracy introduced by the proposed method for the point and probabilistic forecasting are 15.08% and 15.85%, respectively.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗

Current Practices in Distribution Utility Resilience Planning for Hurricanes and Non-Winter Storms

This report is part of a series of hazard-focused case studies examining common practices in electric utility resilience planning. We use standard terminology defining resilience as the ability to anticipate, withstand, absorb, and recover from hazards that cause long duration outages. We distinguish between reliability and resilience using IEEE 1366-2022, which defines "major events" as "an event that exceeds reasonable design and/or operational limits of the electric power system." Resilience planning is focused on "major event days" and reliability planning is focused on non-major event days. Utility resilience plans are assessed according to common recommended resilience components that we have identified in existing resilience frameworks. The focus of this report is on hurricanes and severe storms in which the primary hazards are precipitation or high winds. We exclude winter storms with primary hazards of ice and extreme cold, as they are a unique set of hazards with different resilience considerations. Standalone reports focusing on wildfires and winter storms have been published in parallel with this report. This report can be used as a starting point for understanding potential investment prioritization processes and investment options. This report is intended to improve utility resilience planning by supporting constructive dialogue among utilities, regulators, and other stakeholders.

29 ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY↗

A gravo-aeroelastically scaled wind turbine rotor at field-prototype scale with strict structural requirements

A new sub-scale field-prototype design solution is developed to realize the dynamics, structural response, and distributed loads (gravitational, aerodynamic, centrifugal) that are characteristic of a full-scale large, modern wind turbine rotor. Prior work in sub-scale wind turbine testing has focused on matching aerodynamic/aero-elastic characteristics of full-scale rotors at wind tunnel scale. However, large-scale rotor designs must expand beyond this limited set of scaling parameters for cost-effective prototyping and meet strict requirements for structural safety for field testing. Here, the challenge lies in producing a structural design meeting two competing objectives: novel scaling objectives that prescribe the sub-scale blade to have low mass and stiffness; and traditional structural safety objectives that drive the design to have higher stiffness and mass. A 20% gravo-aeroelastically scaled wind turbine blade is developed successfully that satisfies these competing objectives. First, it achieved close agreement for non-dimensional tip deflection and flap-wise blade frequency (both within 2.1%) with a blade mass distribution constrained to produce target gravitational and centrifugal loads. Second, the entire blade structure was optimized to ensure a safe, manufacturable solution meeting strict strength requirements for a testing site that can experience up to 45 m/s wind gusts. The prototype-scale blade was fabricated and successfully proof-load tested.

17 WIND ENERGY↗

PreMevE Update: Forecasting Ultra-Relativistic Electrons Inside Earth's Outer Radiation Belt

Energetic electrons inside Earth's Van Allen belts pose a major radiation threat to spaceborne electronics that often play vital roles in modern society. Ultra-relativistic electrons with energies greater than or equal to two megaelectron-volt (MeV) are of particular interest, and thus forecasting these ≥2 MeV electrons has a significant meaning to all space sectors. Here, we update the latest development of the predictive model for MeV electrons in the outer radiation belt. The new version, called PREdictive MEV Electron (PreMevE)-2E, forecasts ultra-relativistic electron flux distributions across the outer belt, with no need for in situ measurements of the trapped MeV electron population except at the geosynchronous orbit (GEO). Model inputs include precipitating electrons observed in low-Earthorbits by NOAA satellites, upstream solar wind speeds and densities from solar wind monitors, as well as ultra-relativistic electrons measured by one Los Alamos GEO satellite. We evaluated 32 supervised machine learning models that fall into four different classes of linear and neural network architectures, and successfully tested ensemble forecasting by using groups of top-performing models. All models are individually trained, validated, and tested by in situ electron data from NASA's Van Allen Probes mission. It is shown that the final ensemble model outperforms individual models at most L-shells, and this PreMevE-2E model can provide 25-h (~1-day) and 50-h (~2-day) forecasts with high mean performance efficiency and correlation values. Our results also suggest that this new model is dominated by nonlinear components at L-shells <~4 for ultra-relativistic electrons, different from the dominance of linear components for 1 MeV electrons as previously discovered.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗