Energy Analysis News
Explore our archive of Energy Analysis news stories.
Dec. 20, 2019
A new modeling approach takes future climate and water resource conditions into account for long-term electricity generation infrastructure planning.
Dec. 18, 2019
A flagship NREL analysis project, the fifth annual Standard Scenarios Outlook models 36 possible projections for power sector evolution through the year 2050.
Dec. 12, 2019
Expanding solar energy’s reach, one estimate at a time. Meet PVWatts.
Dec. 11, 2019
Analysts modeled how the future U.S. power system could operate with up to 55% solar energy penetration.
Dec. 5, 2019
The latest REopt Lite upgrades address users' growing focus on providing backup power to sustain critical load during outages. Expanded resilience capabilities enable users to optimally size new diesel generation and better understand the benefits and trade-offs of resilience.
Dec. 2, 2019
New collection of historic U.S. power plant efficiency data can be used to more accurately model the integration of variable solar and wind energy on the grid.
Oct. 29, 2019
The U.S. Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) today won two R&D 100 Awards from R&D World magazine.
Oct. 23, 2019
The Mobility Energy Productivity (MEP) metric comprehensively quantifies the efficiency of transportation systems while taking time, affordability, and energy use into consideration.
Oct. 16, 2019
Outlined in their article in IEEE Transactions on Power Systems, NREL researchers and colleagues proposed an update to the IEEE Reliability Test System (RTS) to bring it into the 21st century.
Oct. 1, 2019
What might the U.S. energy generation mix look like between now and the year 2050? Thanks to the now publicly available Regional Energy Deployment System model, or ReEDS for short, we can now explore how the power system will evolve under changing market conditions.
Sept. 11, 2019
In a recent article for Nature Sustainability, NREL's Lead Energy-Water-Land Analyst Jordan Macknick and co-authors investigated the potential benefits of co-located agriculture and solar photovoltaic (PV) infrastructure (dubbed “agrivoltaics”) on food production, irrigation water requirements, and energy production.
Aug. 22, 2019
NREL’s 2019 Partner Forum brought together energy industry leaders across multiple sectors to discuss today’s energy challenges and explore tomorrow’s potential solutions.
Aug. 1, 2019
NREL researchers are creating useful software applications designed to help highlight potential costs and savings associated with renewable energy and energy efficiency technologies. In doing so, they hope to shorten the path to commercialization and increase overall adoption of those technologies.
Aug. 1, 2019
NREL has released a 2019 update to the Annual Technology Baseline, a key source of reliable electricity generation technology cost and performance data used to support and inform electric sector analysis in the United States.
July 16, 2019
NREL hosted twelfth annual symposium on energy storage.
July 16, 2019
The researchers leveraged on-road data from Volvo vehicles driving around Gothenburg, Sweden, and compared fuel efficiency for cars that used adaptive cruise control to those that did not.
July 10, 2019
While solar generation helps to significantly reduce emissions in the energy sector, ground-mounted solar arrays can still lead to environmental impacts. NREL analysts argue that a new framework can help mitigate, or even avoid, environmental degradation.
July 10, 2019
Declining cost trajectory could pave the way for battery storage to serve peak electricity demand.
July 8, 2019
Researchers provide early insights into the potential market impacts of the expansion of community choice aggregations, including how they might drive demand for renewable electricity.
June 18, 2019
Rebecca Hanes and team developed a new ground-breaking analysis, Quantifying Adoption Rates and Energy Savings over Time for Advanced Energy-Efficient Manufacturing Technologies, published in the Journal of Cleaner Production.
June 13, 2019
As part of its partnership with ExxonMobil, NREL researchers will take a closer look at air pollutant emissions from the entire biofuels supply chain, as well as the resulting impacts on air quality.
June 7, 2019
Renewable portfolio standards, or RPSs, can be designed in numerous ways. New research details best practices for ensuring RPS policies meet their desired objectives, highlighting examples from around the globe.
April 29, 2019
NREL, which already has some 850 active partnership agreements with more than 500 partners in industry, government, and academia, is helping change the clean energy landscape along with its partners.
April 22, 2019
While hundreds of millions of tons of trash continue to be dumped into American landfills annually, a growing percentage has been diverted to recycling centers since the first Earth Day in 1970. But these centers aren't set up for renewable energy technologies.
March 6, 2019
Building owners and energy managers looking to evaluate renewable energy and storage economics for their site can use REopt™ Lite's custom utility rate tariff capabilities and an integrated critical load profile builder—new features that allow a more detailed energy analysis without leaving the tool.
Feb. 19, 2019
The findings reveal gallium oxide wafers could be three to five times cheaper to manufacture than another related technology, silicon carbide.
Jan. 10, 2019
A group of NREL researchers recently collaborated with expert modelers from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and the Electric Power Research Institute to improve the treatment of variable renewable energy, such as wind and solar, in the flagship planning models used by these research organizations.
