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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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NREL contracted with the Energy Center of Wisconsin to review the Commercial Building Partnerships projects and identify and compile the best practices for ten energy conservation measures that were tested in those projects. The resulting compilation is presented in this report.
Plug loads are often not considered as part of the energy savings measures in Commercial Buildings; however, they can account for up to 50% of the energy used in the building. These loads are numerous and often scattered throughout a building. Some of these loads are purchased by the owner and some designed into the building or the tenant finishes for a space. This document provides a strategy and a tool for minimizing these loads.
This is a literature review of commercial compliance studies related to building energy codes.
The goal of developing a new source of electric power based on fusion has been pursued for decades. If successful, future fusion power plants will help meet growing world-wide demand for electric power. A key feature and selling point for fusion is that its fuel supply is widely distributed globally and virtually inexhaustible. Current world-wide research on fusion energy is focused on the deuterium-tritium (DT for short) fusion reaction since it will be the easiest to achieve in terms of the conditions (e.g., temperature, density and confinement time of the DT fuel) required to produce net energy. Over the past decades countless studies have examined various concepts for TBBs for both magnetic fusion energy (MFE) and inertial fusion energy (IFE). At this time, the key organizations involved are government sponsored research organizations world-wide. The near-term focus of the MFE community is on the development of TBB mock-ups to be tested on the ITER tokamak currently under construction in Caderache France. TBB concepts for IFE tend to be different from MFE primarily due to significantly different operating conditions and constraints. This report focuses on longer-term commercial power plants where the key stakeholders include: electric utilities, plant owner and operator, manufacturer, regulators, utility customers, and in-plant subsystems including the heat transfer and conversion systems, fuel processing system, plant safety systems, and the monitoring control systems.
Leadership by state and local governments is critical to unlock national energy efficiency opportunities and deliver the benefits of efficiency to all Americans. But related to building energy efficiency, what will it mean to be a public sector leader over the next several years? What are the energy efficiency solutions that cities, counties, and states are implementing today that will make their communities more affordable, livable, healthy, and economically competitive? The SEE Action Network 2020 Leadership Agenda for Existing Commercial and Multifamily Buildings establishes a benchmark for state and local government leadership on improving the energy efficiency of buildings and seeks two-way collaboration among state, local, and federal officials. It defines a suite of innovative, yet practical policies and programs for policymakers to consider implementing by 2020, focusing on six important areas.
This protocol is intended to describe the recommended method when evaluating the whole-building performance of new construction projects in the commercial sector. The protocol focuses on energy conservation measures (ECMs) or packages of measures where evaluators can analyze impacts using building simulation. These ECMs typically require the use of calibrated building simulations under Option D of the International Performance Measurement and Verification Protocol (IPMVP).
This analysis elucidates the emerging market for distributed solar paired with battery energy storage in commercial buildings across the United States. It provides insight into the near-term and future solar and solar-plus-storage market opportunities as well as the variables that impact the expected savings from installing behind-the-meter systems.
To support an ongoing project at NREL titled 'An Open, Cloud-Based Platform for Whole-Building Fault Detection and Diagnostics' (work breakdown structure number 3.2.6.18 funded by the Department of Energy Building Technologies Office), this report documents faults that are commonly found in small commercial buildings (with a floor area of 10,000 ft2 or less) based on a literature review and discussions with building commissioning experts. It also provides a list of prioritized faults based on an estimation of the prevalence, energy impact, and financial impact of each fault.
This document summarizes a study by Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and the University of California's Haas School of Business about energy cost and its impact on commercial mortgage default rates, with information about the impact of energy risk on mortgage pricing and the development of an energy risk metric.
This guide presents an overview of the top energy-savings opportunities in commercial buildings and shows how they can be identified using the type of interval meter analytics offered in energy information system technologies or using the automated analytics offered in fault detection and diagnostics systems.
This presentation summarizes the findings of a published paper on the first commercialization of four diverse energy technologies: thin film photovoltaics, wind turbine blades, dual-stage refrigeration evaporators, and fuel cells for material handling equipment.
The state of Washington recently updated their current state commercial energy code, which is the 2018 Washington State Energy Code (2018 WSEC-C) to an updated version named the 2021 WSEC-C. This report assesses the life cycle costs and savings and greenhouse gas emissions impacts of the 2021 WSEC-C compared to the 2018 WSEC-C, as requested by the Washington State Building Code Council (SBCC).
This document discusses the development of a segmentation approach for the U.S. commercial building stock that is focused on identifying similarities that align with common decarbonization strategies. The resulting nine-segment approach primarily uses similarities in heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems, service water heating systems, and presence of cooking equipment to separate buildings into categories.
The “Optimizing Alabama’s CO 2 Storage in Shelby County: Project OASIS” CarbonSAFE Phase II Project seeks to build on regional data sets that demonstrate that the subsurface within Shelby County, Alabama has the potential to store commercial volumes of CO 2 safely, permanently, and economically. This work builds on the initiatives of the Southeast Regional Carbon Utilization and Storage Acceleration Partnership (SECARB-USA, DE-FE0031830) that identified nearly 500 million metric tonnes of CO 2 emitted on an annual basis from industrial facilities that are not collocated with prospective storage geology (i.e., the Coastal Plain of the Southeastern U.S. in this context). This observation suggests costly investments in connective infrastructure (e.g., pipelines) or exploratory well drilling campaigns are required to identify CO 2 storage opportunities in under-developed areas. While not traditionally thought of for saline storage, these studies suggest that storage prospects in the Valley and Ridge Province of the Appalachian Fold and Thrust Belt occur in relatively flat lying structural panels between thrust faults. For the Project OASIS region, available geologic studies related to hydrocarbon exploration suggest that Cambro-Ordovician carbonates and Cambrian clastic units offer multiple potential storage intervals, and that regional confining systems are present, such as the tectonically thickened Floyd-Parkwood Shale.
Cation-disordered rock-salt cathodes (DRX) are promising materials that could deliver high capacities (>250 mAh g −1 ) with Earth abundant elements and materials. However, their electrochemical performances, other than the capacity, should be improved to be competitive cathodes, and many strategies have been introduced to enhance DRXs. Fluorination has been shown to inhibit oxygen loss and increase power density. Nevertheless, fluorinated cation-disordered rock-salts still suffer from rapid material deterioration and low scalability which limit their practical applications. This mini-review highlights the key challenges for the commercialization of fluorinated cation-disordered rock-salts, discusses the underlying reasons behind material failure and proposes future development directions.
Governments are increasingly turning toward public–private partnerships to bring industry support to improving public assets or services. Here, we describe a unique public–private collaboration where a government entity has developed mechanisms to support public and private sector advancement and commercialization of monitoring technologies for marine renewable energy. These support mechanisms include access to a range of skilled personnel and test facilities that promote rapid innovation, prove reliability, and inspire creativity in technology development as innovations move from concept to practice. The ability to iteratively test hardware and software components, sensors, and systems can accelerate adoption of new methods and instrumentation designs. As a case study, we present the development of passive acoustic monitoring technologies customized for operation in energetic waves and currents. We discuss the value of testing different systems together, under the same conditions, as well as the progression through different test locations. The outcome is multiple, complementary monitoring technologies that are well suited to addressing an area of high environmental uncertainty and reducing barriers to responsible deployment of low-carbon energy conversion systems, creating solutions for the future.
Here, this article addresses the architecture development for a commercial vehicle fuel cell electric powertrain by establishing a clear multi-step formalized workflow that employs a unique technoeconomic solution for architecture selection. The power capability of the fuel cell, the energy capacity and chemistry of the electrical energy storage (battery), the DC-DC converter (including the input current rating and isolation resistance requirements), the traction drive solution, the on-board hydrogen storage solution, and the real-time power-split management of the fuel cell and the battery are all considered and developed in this effort. The methods were used to select architecture for Class 8 urban, regional, and line haul applications. When compared to traditional load-following power-split controllers, an energy management power-split controller can increase system energy efficiency by up to 19.5%. The energy-efficient power-split controller may increase the required battery capacity for an equivalent life by up to 2.6 times. The impact on the total cost of ownership (TCO) for a variety of financial cases demonstrates that high C-rate capable batteries have the potential to provide better TCO solutions over a six-year vehicle life than low C-rate capable batteries. To achieve TCO parity with the 600 A non-isolated DC-DC converter case, the specific choice of the fuel cell DC-DC converter to achieve a target power output based on current levels (from 500 A to 2400 A) shows that efficiency decreases and cost increases due to the higher current, requiring fuel cell prices to decrease by $50–$100/kW, $60–$110/kW, and $100–$220/kW for urban, regional, and line haul applications, respectively. Key recommendations for powertrain system architectures are provided, with specifics based on vehicle dynamics, mission and application characteristics, end customer use-case profile, critical powertrain component costs, and architecture selection cost function. This study rigorously demonstrates the interplay of the above parameters, with a focus on TCO, and provides application decision-makers with a mechanism and well-defined set of impact factors to consider as part of their architecture selection process.
Marine energy developers experience unique challenges in commercializing their early-stage technologies. This presentation outlines those unique challenges from the social, environmental, and financial perspectives, how those challenges are currently being addressed, and acts as the foundation for a breakout discussion on identifying further challenges developers experience and what other resources are being leveraged. This discussion will then precede short presentations from organizations that are already providing direct support to developers in this space and offer opportunities to connect. The content included in this presentation is a summary of the following technical report: https://docs.nlr.gov/docs/fy25osti/91213.pdf.