Energy Analysis News
Explore our archive of Energy Analysis news stories.
Dec. 28, 2022
NREL researchers and staff reached countless goals and achieved numerous successes in science, partnerships, and commercialization in 2022. Here are just a few of the highlights.
Dec. 8, 2022
NREL has released the 2022 Standard Scenarios, a suite of forward-looking scenarios of the U.S. electricity sector.
Dec. 6, 2022
Analysts at the Joint Institute for Strategic Energy Analysis and National Renewable Energy Laboratory studied lab-to-market pathways for clean energy technologies.
Dec. 1, 2022
NREL is enthusiastically supporting development of electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) technologies, and a new collaboration with the U.S. Air Force is taking that research to new heights.
Nov. 30, 2022
NREL has released its annual cost breakdown of installed solar photovoltaic (PV) and battery storage systems.
Nov. 30, 2022
NREL announced 12 communities as winners of Step 1 of the American-Made Solar Automated Permit Processing Plus (SolarAPP+) Prize—a two-step competition to help communities adopt automated processing of residential solar permits, lowering costs and making solar more accessible for homeowners.
Nov. 16, 2022
Electric vehicle adoption is increasing—and fast. At this point, you may own one or probably know someone who does.
Nov. 9, 2022
NREL-developed PRECISE™ automates interconnection assessments to help customers and utilities reach growing solar goals.
Nov. 3, 2022
The clean energy revolution can only succeed if U.S. manufacturers have the materials, components, infrastructure, and other resources needed to meet ambitious emissions-reduction targets. New supply chain strategies are helping make the production of renewable energy technologies as sustainable as their operation.
Nov. 3, 2022
NREL-authored reports provided insights on supply chain issues related to solar photovoltaic, wind power, energy storage, semiconductor, and hydrogen fuel cell and electrolyzer technologies.
Oct. 6, 2022
Elizabeth Doris officially takes the helm of the Joint Institute for Strategic Energy Analysis. Get to know Doris and her vision for the institute moving forward.
Oct. 5, 2022
NREL and Duke Energy investigated the pathways to a decarbonized grid.
Sept. 29, 2022
West Gate is a program that embeds innovators at NREL and pairs them with national laboratory scientists and capabilities over a period of two years, during which they have prime access to world-class national laboratory capabilities and expertise to significantly advance the development of their clean-energy technologies.
Sept. 21, 2022
Researchers at NREL have devised an innovative way to quantify and understand mobility quality and equity issues: the Mobility Energy Productivity (MEP) tool. MEP distills three major components of mobility--time, cost, and energy--into a simple, easy-to-read score.
Sept. 21, 2022
New study led by the Joint Institute for Strategic Energy Analysis identifies drivers, barriers, and costs of adopting building sensors and controls systems.
Sept. 12, 2022
A growing body of research has demonstrated that cost-effective high-renewable power systems are possible, but costs increase as systems approach 100% carbon-free electricity—what has become known as the "last 10% problem."
Sept. 8, 2022
Distributed energy resources (DERs) with advanced controls can provide services to the grid such as frequency response. However, unlike conventional generators, DERs have to regularly exchange signals with faraway control centers.
Aug. 30, 2022
NREL study identifies the opportunities and challenges of achieving the U.S. transformational goal of 100% clean electricity by 2035.
Aug. 30, 2022
Researchers at NREL are considering circular economy strategies to mitigate the impact of wind turbine blades at the end of their useful lifespan.
Aug. 22, 2022
R&D World magazine today presented NREL with one of its annual R&D 100 Awards for research innovations. The Standard Energy Efficiency Data (SEED) Platform, developed in collaboration with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, is a data management and analysis tool that helps cities improve their building stock and reduce carbon emissions.
Aug. 22, 2022
In 2019, Washington, D.C., started using the Standard Energy Efficiency Data (SEED) Platform, a web-based software created by NREL and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to manage data from large groups of buildings and help cities reduce the energy consumption and carbon emissions of their building stock.
Aug. 17, 2022
The Joint Institute for Strategic Energy Analysis released a best-practices guide to supporting community energy planning.
Aug. 10, 2022
NREL's energy analysts use the "three Rs" concept to provide a fuller picture of power system reliability with changing resource mixes and grid conditions.
Aug. 9, 2022
State and local zoning laws and ordinances influence how and where wind and solar energy projects can be sited and deployed—which can have a measurable impact on U.S. renewable energy resource potential.
Aug. 8, 2022
NREL and DFW Airport have committed to working from the ground up at the system level on sustainability, decarbonization, and energy-efficiency overhauls, designing upgrades and implementations that can integrate intelligently across the board.
July 25, 2022
NREL's Distributed Generation Market Demand Model helps identify where distributed energy resources could provide the most value to the grid, informing new compensation mechanisms.
July 20, 2022
With integrated analysis from NREL, the FAA can create safety standards and recommend efficient and resilient airport infrastructure able to support electrified aircraft designs.
July 18, 2022
Video explains how having more than enough renewable energy capacity can make the grid more flexible.
July 15, 2022
From sustainable fuels to airport infrastructure analysis to next-gen aircraft, NREL offers solutions for lowering emissions in a sector that is among the most difficult to decarbonize.
July 1, 2022
How do we reduce the carbon impact of an already green technology?
June 29, 2022
A global research effort spearheaded by NREL has assessed two promising technologies to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. While still in the early stages of development, direct air carbon capture and sequestration--together with other carbon dioxide removal strategies--are considered critical to achieving a net-zero greenhouse gas emissions economy.
June 27, 2022
In a new comprehensive literature review, researchers at NREL discovered that alternatives to recycling may have untapped potential to build an effective circular economy for solar photovoltaic and battery technologies, such as reducing the use of virgin materials in manufacturing, reusing for new applications, and extending product life spans.
June 14, 2022
Here's What You Need to Know About This Year's Annual Technology Baseline, Including Distributed Wind and Pumped Storage Hydropower Supply Curve Data for the First Time
June 6, 2022
Ten years after visionary renewable electricity futures study showed an 80% renewable U.S. Grid was possible, NREL experts recount how they've built on those findings in the decade since—and what is next.
June 2, 2022
A new video and report explain why fault protection should be on grid planners' radar as the power system continues to evolve.
May 26, 2022
The third catalyzer in the JISEA Catalyzers initiative will explore algorithmic energy efficiency, in addition to ways to limit energy usage of computing and potential pathways to reuse, repair, or recycle hardware products and materials.
May 25, 2022
Bioenergy and waste-to-energy researcher Anelia Milbrandt will be featured in an upcoming children's book including stories of modern diverse women working in energy.
May 12, 2022
The U.S. federal government has set a goal of 100% clean electricity in 2035 and a net-zero carbon economy in 2050. To achieve these ambitious targets, all forms of renewable power will be important—including distributed wind.
May 5, 2022
Perovskite materials may hold the potential to play an important role in a process to produce hydrogen in a renewable manner, according to an analysis from scientists at NREL.
April 29, 2022
Researchers at NREL are leading research to address bias in artificial intelligence and machine learning for clean energy innovation.
April 22, 2022
Meeting U.S. decarbonization goals is expected to require rapid deployment of additional wind energy. As more wind is deployed, social and ecological considerations of the surrounding landscape are becoming increasingly important--but research on the land use impacts of wind deployment has been limited.
April 19, 2022
The electric distribution grid is changing at a rapid rate, with distributed energy resources (DERs) such as rooftop solar arrays, energy storage, and electric vehicles arriving on the grid in fast-growing numbers. However, it is not always clear how much additional DER capacity a community's grid can accommodate.
April 13, 2022
Energy storage will likely play a critical role in a low-carbon, flexible, and resilient future grid, the Storage Futures Study (SFS) concludes.
April 7, 2022
NREL released an in-depth report on the potential for clean energy development in Mexico, finding that Mexico is ideally poised to become a clean energy powerhouse.
April 6, 2022
As part of the Manufacturing Masterminds Q&A profile series, Parthiv Kurup shares how his analyses are streamlining manufacturing processes to reduce the sector's energy consumption while reducing costs.
April 4, 2022
Rising temperatures and sea levels. More frequent and severe hurricanes, wildfires, floods, and droughts. Deteriorating air and water quality. These trends can be traced back to climate change—with cities facing disproportionate risks due to rapid population growth.
March 23, 2022
An analysis led by NREL is now underway to supply Puerto Rico with options for achieving a renewable, reliable, and equitable electric power system.
March 14, 2022
Greenhouse gas emissions from air conditioners are expected to climb as economic growth drives efforts to control both temperature and humidity, according to an analysis by scientists from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and Xerox PARC.
March 4, 2022
New modeling approach intersects equity metrics and renewable energy technical potential to prioritize communities that need these benefits the most.
Feb. 28, 2022
No U.S. cities have done anything like what Cohoes, New York, was proposing: a municipally-owned and operated floating solar installation—but there was no reason it would not work. The technology of floating solar is sound, and their reservoir could hold enough panels to power all Cohoes city-owned buildings and streetlights—erasing around $500,000 in annual electricity costs.
Feb. 10, 2022
We can currently link models and simulations across the national laboratory complex, but imagine connecting these models with equipment, devices, and scientists so they can work together as if side by side instead of thousands of miles apart.
Feb. 7, 2022
The Solar Futures Study draws insights from across NREL's expertise and tools to deliver detailed analysis of solar energy's future in the United States.
Feb. 2, 2022
REopt, a free, techno-economic decision support model, helps users optimize energy systems for buildings, campuses, communities, and microgrids. Once called REopt Lite, the REopt tool is dropping the "Lite" in 2022 to better reflect its true status as a heavy-hitting and comprehensive optimization tool.
Jan. 18, 2022
The REopt® web tool is a techno-economic decision support platform used by researchers to optimize energy systems for buildings, campuses, communities, microgrids, and more, helping users determine the optimal size and combination of energy systems to maximize cost savings while meeting resilience or energy performance goals.
Jan. 12, 2022
The latest phase of the Storage Futures Study finds the grid operates more efficiently with high levels of energy storage across all studied system configurations and grid mixes.
Jan. 10, 2022
Over the past year, NREL researchers have pioneered innovative, interdisciplinary, and integrated research and development for technology advancements in electrochemical, molecular, thermal, and mechanical energy storage systems.
