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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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Flexible Financial Credit Agreements is a broad term used to describe a suite of solar products with innovative features not currently offered in traditional solar financing programs. This brief focuses on the Tariff On-Bill Financing (TOBF) model, in which utilities use a tariff to enable customers to pay back the cost of a solar panel without credit or income level conditions.
This research identifies barriers and challenges and current industry status including several key appraisal industry developments for identifying and valuing energy efficiency, critical obstacles to documenting and assessing the potential added value from energy efficiency improvements, current opportunities to support and standardize reporting on energy efficiency and to ensure propervaluation, and next steps towards enabling energy efficiency financing market transformation.
DNV Renewables (USA) Inc. (DNV) used an Operations and Maintenance (O&M) Cost Model to evaluate ten distinct cost scenarios encountered under variations in wind turbine component failure rates. The analysis considers 1) a Reference Scenario using the default part failure rates within the O&M Cost Model, 2) High Failure Rate Scenarios that increase the failure rates of three major components(blades, gearboxes, and generators) individually, 3) 100% Replacement Scenarios that model full replacement of these components over a 20 year operating life, and 4) Serial Failure Scenarios that model full replacement of blades, gearboxes, and generators in years 4 to 6 of the wind project. DNV selected these scenarios to represent a broad range of possible operational experiences. Also in thisreport, DNV summarizes the predominant financing arrangements used to develop wind energy projects over the past several years and provides summary data on various financial metrics describing those arrangements.
This research identifies barriers and challenges and current industry status including several key appraisal industry developments for identifying and valuing energy efficiency. The report covers critical obstacles to documenting and assessing the potential added value from energy efficiency improvements, current opportunities to support and standardize reporting on energy efficiency and to ensure proper valuation, and next steps towards enabling energy efficiency financing market transformation.
Provides key considerations for policymakers, energy efficiency program administrators, and program partners om implementing successful energy efficiency financing programs for existing buildings.
The primary purpose of this brief, and the full assessment from which its content is derived, is to assist USAID staff in identifying opportunities for designing new interventions that integrate climate finance into their existing/planned energy sector programming. USAID staff are encouraged to review the various examples presented to determine if any aspect of the proposed approaches are applicable to the countries/regions in which they operate.
This fact sheet summarizes 7 common external financing modes and provides examples for each: Energy-as-a-Service, Energy Savings Performance Contracts, Power Purchase Agreements, Sustainability Linked-Loans, Green Loans, Property Assessed Clean Energy, and On-Bill Financing/Repayment.
The whole cycle of the decommissioning process development of repository requires the relevant bodies to have a financial system to ensure that it has sufficient funds for its whole life cycle (over periods of many decades). Therefore, the financing mechanism and management system shall respect the following status: the national position, institutional and legislative environment, technical capabilities, the waste origin, ownership, characteristics and inventories. The main objective of the studies is to focus on the cost considerations, alternative funding managements and mechanisms, technical and non-technical factors that may affect the repository life-cycle costs. As a conclusion, the outcomes of this paper is to make a good recommendation and could be applied to the national planners, regulatory body, engineers, or the managers, to form a financial management plan for the decommissioning of the Nuclear Installation.
Although several models have been proposed towards assisting machine learning (ML) tasks with quantum computers, a direct comparison of the expressive power and efficiency of classical versus quantum models for datasets originating from real-world applications is one of the key milestones towards a quantum ready era. Here, we take a first step towards addressing this challenge by performing a comparison of the widely used classical ML models known as restricted Boltzmann machines (RBMs), against a recently proposed quantum model, now known as quantum circuit Born machines (QCBMs). Both models address the same hard tasks in unsupervised generative modeling, with QCBMs exploiting the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics and a candidate for near-term quantum computers, as experimentally demonstrated in three different quantum hardware architectures to date. To address the question of the performance of the quantum model on real-world classical data sets, we construct scenarios from a probabilistic version out of the well-known portfolio optimization problem in finance, by using time-series pricing data from asset subsets of the S&P500 stock market index. It is remarkable to find that, under the same number of resources in terms of parameters for both classical and quantum models, the quantum models seem to have superior performance on typical instances when compared with the canonical training of the RBMs. Our simulations are grounded on a hardware efficient realization of the QCBMs on ion-trap quantum computers, by using their native gate sets, and therefore readily implementable in near-term quantum devices.
Historically, state and local governmental agencies have employed one of two models to deploy solar photovoltaic (PV) projects: (1) self-ownership (financed through a variety of means) or (2) third-party ownership through a power purchase agreement (PPA). Morris County, New Jersey, administrators recently pioneered a way to combine many of the benefits of self-ownership and third-party PPAsthrough a bond-PPA hybrid, frequently referred to as the Morris Model. At the request of the Department of Energy's Solar Market Transformation group, NREL examined the hybrid model. This fact sheet describes how the hybrid model works, assesses the model's relative advantages and challenges as compared to self-ownership and the third-party PPA model, provides a quick guide to projectimplementation, and assesses the replicability of the model in other jurisdictions across the United States.
Capabilities overview of NREL's Project Finance and Development Group within the Deployment and Market Transformation Directorate.
This paper explores the possibility of financing renewable energy projects through raising capital in the public markets. It gives an overview of the size, structure, and benefits of public capital markets, as well as showing how renewable energy projects might take advantage of this source of new funds to lower the cost of electricity.
This study explores the likely project financing and market impacts from the expiration of the §1603 Program.
Government policy is one of the most important factors in engaging the private sector in providing universal access to electricity. In particular, the private sector is well positioned to provide decentralized electricity products and services. While policy uncertainty and regulatory barriers can keep enterprises and investors from engaging in the market, targeted policies can create opportunities to leverage private investment and skills to expand electricity access. However, creating a sustainable market requires policies beyond traditional electricity regulation. The report reviews the range of policy issues that impact the development and expansion of a market for decentralized electricity services from establishing an enabling policy environment to catalyzing finance, building human capacity, and integrating energy access with development programs. The case studies in this report show that robust policy frameworks--addressing a wide range of market issues--can lead to rapid transformation in energy access. The report highlights examples of these policies in action Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Mali, Mexico, and Nepal.
The award supported the demonstration and development of the Village Power Platform, which enables community organizations to more readily develop, finance and operate solar installations on local community organizations. The platform enables partial or complete local ownership of the solar installation. The award specifically supported key features including financial modeling tools, community communications tools, crowdfunding mechanisms, a mobile app, and other critical features.
Estimates of the total opportunity for investment in cost-effective energy efficiency in the United States are typically in the range of several hundred billion dollars (Choi Granade, et al., 2009 and Fulton & Brandenburg, 2012).1,2 To access this potential, many state policymakers and utility regulators have established aggressive energy efficiency savings targets. Current levels of taxpayer and utility bill-payer funding for energy efficiency is only a small fraction of the total investment needed to meet these targets (SEE Action Financing Solutions Working Group, 2013). Given this challenge, some energy efficiency program administrators are working to access private capital sources with the aim of amplifying the funds available for investment. In this context, efficient access to secondary market capital has been advanced as one important enabler of the energy efficiency industry “at scale.”3 The question of what role secondary markets can play in bringing energy efficiency to scale is largely untested despite extensive attention from media, technical publications, advocates, and others. Only a handful of transactions of energy efficiency loan products have been executed to date, and it is too soon to draw robust conclusions from these deals. At the same time, energy efficiency program administrators and policymakers face very real decisions regarding whether and how to access secondary markets as part of their energy efficiency deployment strategy.
Many countries and cities are considering and planning for power sector resilience through undertaking vulnerability assessments and developing resilience action plans. However, to ensure these plans have an impact, there is a critical need to identify and scale up financing for power sector resilience actions. These investments go beyond the basic needs for power generation and support a secure, reliable, and resilient power system in the face of natural, technological, and man-made threats.
This technical report benchmarks current project financing costs for multiple renewable and conventional energy technologies, and looks out how these costs may change in the future. This report was performed in conjunction with NREL's Annual Technology Baseline.