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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 1,009 records · Page 56
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
DOE OSTI2021

DEPRECATED - Sharing the Sun Community Solar Project Data (Dec 2020, Revision)

This data set is no longer current – The most current data and all historical data sets can be found at https://data.nrel.gov/submissions/244 This database represents a list of community solar projects identified through various sources as of Dec 2020. The list has been reviewed but errors may exist and the list may not be comprehensive. Errors in the sources e.g. press releases may be duplicated in the list. Blank spaces represent missing information. NREL invites input to improve the database including to - correct erroneous information - add missing projects - fill in missing information - remove inactive projects. Updated information can be submitted to the contact(s) located on the current data set page linked at the top. The revision dataset included projects with a total installed capacity in 2020 under the state-level program but missing the project level details.

14 SOLAR ENERGY↗
DOE OSTI2022

Workplace Charging Data

A data set gathered and maintained by NREL that tracks over 300 vehicles during the course of a 4-year period and how they behave in a workplace charging capacity. The data is further enriched by examining the effect of free charging versus paid charging. There is also a distinction in data marked by the onset of Covid-19. Vehicles are owned and operated by employees and range from smaller pack PHEV to larger pack BEVs.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗
DOE OSTI2022

DEPRECATED - Sharing the Sun Community Solar Project Data (December 2021)

This data set is no longer current – The most current data and all historical data sets can be found at https://data.nrel.gov/submissions/244 This database represents a list of community solar projects identified through various sources as of Dec 2021. The list has been reviewed but errors may exist and the list may not be comprehensive. Errors in the sources e.g. press releases may be duplicated in the list. Blank spaces represent missing information. NREL invites input to improve the database including to - correct erroneous information - add missing projects - fill in missing information - remove inactive projects. Updated information can be submitted to the contact(s) located on the current data set page linked at the top.

14 SOLAR ENERGY↗
DOE OSTI2020

PV High Wind User Test Facility

The creation of a PV high wind test facility at the NREL Flatirons Campus that will enable private and public research efforts aimed at storm hardening PV systems. The facility will be instrumented to monitor effects of high wind conditions on modules and other array components. These in-field tests will coordinate with flow models, wind tunnel testing, validation of PV aeroelastic design codes, and post-testing module and system component analysis.

14 SOLAR ENERGY↗
DOE OSTI2020

Today’s Energy Challenges, Tomorrow’s Solutions: Circular Economy: Designing to Reduce, Reuse, and Upcycle

Transitioning to a Circular Economy the days of creating, using, and disposing of materials are rapidly coming to a close. This linear economy is not only inefficient and unsustainable, but the scarcity of resources we ultimately will face will make it impossible to maintain. That's why NREL is dedicating resources to research that will underpin a circular economy - designing materials with reducing, reusing, and upcycling in mind for energy-relevant and energy-intensive materials, processes, and technologies. This effort will help mitigate supply issues, promote upcycling, reduce waste, and add value to end-of-life products.

circular economy↗
DOE OSTI2020

Accelerating Deployment of Distributed Photovoltaics in Partner Countries

There is a significant opportunity to help developing countries quickly augment DPV programs, and a wealth of international experience and expertise to draw upon to do so. USAID has launched a multi-year program to assist countries across the DPV spectrum. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) is supporting USAID (and drawing on Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and others) in developing and implementing pilot projects in selected USAID partner countries, collaborating with these countries to accelerate DPV market development.

distributed photovoltaics↗
DOE OSTI2022

Women in Power System Transformation

The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) – National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) Partnership and the Global Power System Transformation (G-PST) Consortium joined together to launch the Women in Power System Transformation initiative. This initiative aims to increase gender equality in the global transition to clean energy by providing in-depth technical capacity building for women in emerging economies, so they are prepared to excel in science and engineering professional roles in the rapidly evolving power sector.

energy equity↗
DOE OSTI2022

High-Fidelity Solar Irradiance Data: Simple Access to State-of-the-Art Information Accelerates Southeast Asia's Clean Energy Economic Transformation

High quality, robust, and reliable renewable energy resource data is foundational to climate-smart decision making, evidence-based policy planning, and clean energy investment mobilization. USAID and NREL, through the Advanced Energy Partnership for Asia, are expanding access to this critical resource data by providing free, high-fidelity solar resource data for Southeast Asia through the RE Data Explorer platform. This brief highlights several ways the Southeast Asia solar resource data has been used for power system planning and project development in the region.

Advanced Energy Partnership for Asia↗
DOE OSTI2023

RE Data Explorer is Expanding Public Access to High-Quality Data and Analytics

The Renewable Energy (RE) Data Explorer is an innovative and intuitive web platform from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID)-National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) Partnership that enables users to easily access high-quality renewable energy resource data and applied analytics.

ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY↗
DOE OSTI2023

Enabling Advanced Energy Systems for Clean, Secure, and Sustainable Economic Growth Across Asia

The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has partnered with the U.S. Department of Energy's national laboratories to form the Advanced Energy Partnership for Asia. Led by USAID and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), the Partnership supports energy sector transformation and the growth of clean, secure, and sustainable energy markets across Asia.

Advanced Energy Partnership for Asia↗
DOE OSTI2024

South Asia Group for Energy-India

The South Asia Group for Energy (SAGE) is working with Grid India and the Central Electricity Authority (CEA) to determine the best methods to deploy more inverter-based resources (IBR) such as solar photovoltaic generators and utility-scale battery. To address grid strength and stability concerns, planners and operators are working with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory's (NREL) team, through SAGE, to identify potential solutions for strengthening the grid and fostering grid reliability.

ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY↗
DOE OSTI2024

Dynamics of Intra-Cell Thermal Front Propagation in Lithium-Ion Battery Safety Issues

Thermal runaway (TR), a critical failure mode in lithium-ion batteries (LIBs), poses significant safety risks and hinders wider application of LIBs. TR typically begins at a localized heat source and spreads across the cell. Understanding thermal front propagation (TFP) characteristics, such as front and velocity, is crucial for assessing energy release and temperature distribution for battery hazardous estimation. Recent studies assume that TR within cells propagates at a near-constant velocity, based on the reaction kinetics and thermal properties. Here, in this study, an intra-battery TR model is further proposed and it indicates that TFP velocity stabilizes when the front is distanced from the heat source. Theoretical estimates for propagation velocity and front are developed and validated through numerical simulations and experimental tests from the NREL Battery Failure Databank. The energy release rate during TFP and the impact of preheating based on a point heat source are explored. This work clarifies the long-standing clouds of the thermal font propagation behaviors within the single cell, highlights the power and beauty of mathematics modeling to describe the complicated thermal behaviors, and provides important guidelines for thermal hazardous understanding for next-generation batteries.

25 ENERGY STORAGE↗
DOE OSTI2020

Evolution of Electric Sector Water Use Under Alternative Electricity Futures

Increasing competition for water resources in the United States could create future challenges for allocating and using thermal cooling water in the U.S. electric power sector. While thermal power plant retirements and the growth of wind and solar technologies can reduce national aggregate power sector cooling water use, local water constraints and growing demand for agricultural or municipal supply could create greater needs for higher-cost alternative water supplies such as groundwater or recycled wastewater. For some regions, these incentives could change future electricity planning and operational decisions. These relationships and impacts are studied here using the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) Regional Energy Deployment System (ReEDS), a national electric sector planning model that has recently been upgraded to include a highly detailed representation of thermal cooling water demand and supply. Thermal power technologies are differentiated by both cooling technology and water source type to track and constrain thermal cooling water use in a way that incorporates both physical and legal water considerations in the United States. This capability is exercised under a range of electricity sector futures with alternative technology costs, fuel prices, and water constraints to illustrate ways that U.S. electric sector water use could evolve under uncertain future electric sector drivers. In exploring changes to regional generation and transmission planning and operation, water requirements, and cost, we highlight the environmental and economic impacts of future power sector water decisions.

29 ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY↗
DOE OSTI2022

Parked aeroelastic field rotor response for a 20% scaled demonstrator of a 13‐MW downwind turbine

Abstract Aeroelastic parked testing of a unique downwind two‐bladed subscale rotor was completed to characterize the response of an extreme‐scale 13‐MW turbine in high‐wind parked conditions. A 20% geometric scaling was used resulting in scaled 20‐m‐long blades, whose structural and stiffness properties were designed using aeroelastic scaling to replicate the nondimensional structural aeroelastic deflections and dynamics that would occur for a lightweight, downwind 13‐MW rotor. The subscale rotor was mounted and field tested on the two‐bladed Controls Advanced Research Turbine (CART2) at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory's Flatiron Campus (NREL FC). The parked testing of these highly flexible blades included both pitch‐to‐run and pitch‐to‐feather configurations with the blades in the horizontal braked orientation. The collected experimental data includes the unsteady flapwise root bending moments and tip deflections as a function of inflow wind conditions. The bending moments are based on strain gauges located in the root section, whereas the tip deflections are captured by a video camera on the hub of the turbine pointed toward the tip of the blade. The experimental results are compared against computational predictions generated by FAST, a wind turbine simulation software, for the subscale and full‐scale models with consistent unsteady wind fields. FAST reasonably predicted the bending moments and deflections of the experimental data in terms of both the mean and standard deviations. These results demonstrate the efficacy of the first such aeroelastically scaled turbine test and demonstrate that a highly flexible lightweight downwind coned rotor can be designed to withstand extreme loads in parked conditions.

17 WIND ENERGY↗
DOE OSTI2023

Data Center Facility Monitoring with Physics Aware Approach

U.S. Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) hosts one of the world's most energy-efficient HPC data centers; this system uses component-level warm-water liquid cooling to efficiently remove heat from the data center and capture it for reuse in the building or rejection to the atmosphere. Given the complexity of this system, building data-driven tools for holistically monitoring and operating the entire data center is a priority for ensuring maximal efficiency and resiliency. In this advanced smart facility, over one million metrics are recorded per minute using state-of-the-art streaming data architecture and software to capture and process the state of the system in real time. Here we detail two efforts to effectively analyze, visualize, and interpret this large volume streaming data. We have developed a novel, flexible system for identifying and visualizing individual metric anomalies and component performance across the data center through automatic metadata extraction and physically-motivated visualization for quick interpretation. Additionally, to directly connect system maintenance to data stream processing we explore a physics informed multi-metric drift and anomaly detection application to detect scale-build up in heat exchangers.

anomaly detection↗
DOE OSTI2025

OptiBench: An Optimization Benchmark Tool for Renewable Energy Problems

We propose a benchmark framework and visualization tool, OptiBench, for analyzing the performance of state-of-the-art optimization solvers across a variety of optimization problems in renewable energy research. Our framework is designed from the ground up in the Julia programming language and enables analysis at scale on high performance computing (HPC) systems. Our visualization tool allows effortless evaluation of optimization solver performance, robustness, and accuracy through intuitive plots, e.g., performance profiles, heat maps, and distribution plots. We have tested three benchmark suites relevant to the modeling of renewable energy systems, viz., CUTEst, PGLib-OPF, and WaterTAP water treatment optimization problems. We illustrate benchmarking of CUTEst using OptiBench on the National Renewable Energy Laboratory's (NREL) HPC Kestrel. Our findings indicate that MA57 HSL linear solver demonstrated the best overall performance for an experimental IPOPT implementation. Our work is ongoing and we intend to add support for more optimization solvers and benchmark test suites in the future.

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗
DOE OSTI2022

Development of integrated screening, cultivar optimization, and verification research (DISCOVR): A coordinated research-driven approach to improve microalgal productivity, composition, and culture stability for commercially viable biofuels production

To address major knowledge gaps and barriers to the commercial development of algal biomass for biofuels and co-products, a collaborative consortium, Development of Integrated Screening, Cultivar Optimization, and Verification Research (DISCOVR), was established in 2016. Funded by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Bioenergy Technologies Office (BETO), this consortium constitutes a partnership between four DOE national laboratories - Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), and Sandia National Laboratories (SNL) - and the Arizona Center for Algae Technology and Innovation (AzCATI) at Arizona State University. To address the barriers of strain selection for achieving high seasonal productivities with a suitable composition and culture resilience, a tiered strain down-selection pipeline is implemented. At Tier I, the temperature and salinity tolerance of strains is determined in flask cultures; at Tier II, the areal biomass productivity and composition is determined in climate-simulation photobioreactors; at Tier III, the productivity and culture stability are determined in outdoor raceways. The top performing strains move forward to long-term testing at the algae testbed site at AzCATI to generate annual biomass productivity data. Concurrent to the strain down-selection in the DISCOVR pipeline, hypotheses for increasing biomass productivity, shifting biomass composition to enhance intrinsic value, and improving culture stability and resistance to pests are also tested. Techno-economic analyses are carried out to determine whether promising findings from laboratory studies or proposed modifications in outdoor pond cultivation conditions translate into reductions in the minimum biomass selling price (MBSP). Notably, in the three years following the launch of DISCOVR, annual biomass productivity has increased from 11.7 to 17.6 g m -2 day -1 , resulting in an MBSP decrease from 824 to 611 $ ton -1 .

09 BIOMASS FUELS↗
DOE OSTI2020

Modeling occupancy-driven building loads for large and diversified building stocks through the use of parametric schedules

Building energy modeling provides a fundamental tool to assess the potential for energy efficiency to contribute to reducing world energy consumption and global emissions. Occupancy-related operations are a key source of uncertainty for building energy analysis, particularly for aggregated building stocks. At a district or city level, it is critical to estimate aggregated power load profiles for sizing power grid infrastructure, power plant capacity allocation, and energy efficiency measures. The stochastic nature of behavior-related operations complicates the creation of models that accurately capture building load profiles for entire building stocks. This research introduces a new methodology called parametric schedules to model occupancy-driven schedules for large and diverse building stocks. In contrast to computationally expensive methodologies proposed in the literature, our work does not use a recursive time-consuming step. Occupancy is estimated by the extrapolation of operation times directly from metered electric consumption data; occupancy-related schedules are stochastically assigned to each building model, guaranteeing diversity of operation times in the stock. Our procedure has been tested on a large, diversified data-set of 25,000 commercial buildings in Los Angeles, California. It proved to be able to adequately represent the stochastic schedules diversity of the stock and to refine the stock calibration process by 1%. This innovative approach represents a useful asset for utility companies, grid operators, urban planners, and balancing authorities, seeking to improve building stock modeling and better estimate the impact of energy conservation measures. – This work is part of a larger stock modeling tool called ComStock, which is under development by NREL.

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗