Energy Systems Integration Newsletter: December 2023

In this edition, NREL and Amazon are modernizing emissions quantification using higher-resolution data and longer-term modeling, the Controllable Grid Interface celebrates 10 years, novel data sets quantify the energetic cost of supercomputing, and more.

Amazon and NREL Team Up on Emissions Analysis

Corporations have embraced a new currency: greenhouse gas emissions. But current methods for calculating emissions impacts are still inexact and fail to capture important factors, such as induced changes to the electric grid. With an increasing number of corporations and research teams recognizing the need to update emissions accounting, NREL and Amazon have launched a collaboration to provide better data to those efforts. NREL researchers will add data around “induced structural change”—the concept that constructing a new facility influences the grid and therefore emissions—into the lab’s flagship tool for emissions analysis, Cambium. These data will improve the accuracy around emissions impacts, benefitting hundreds of companies and organizations.

Learn more about this NREL and Amazon collaboration.

Born in a Flood: The Epic Story of the Controllable Grid Interface

NREL’s 7-MW Controllable Grid Interface has been operational for a decade and used on some 50 projects, playing a huge role in making the grid more reliable, but it had quite the dramatic start.

“It was epic. The deadline was the last day of our fiscal year of 2013, and it coincided with a 100-year flood,” NREL researcher Vahan Gevorgian said. “We worked hard, spending many nights on campus because some of us couldn’t even go home because of the flooding. We survived on pizzas.”

Read more about the dedicated researchers behind the Controllable Grid Interface, how the idea was conceived, and the future expansion of its capabilities.

Researchers Calculate Path to Greener Computing

The worldwide growth in advanced computing has created a looming energy crisis. NREL has emerged as a global leader in green computing, both in making its own computing operations more sustainable and in leading research projects to bring new information and accountability to computing-based research around the globe. In collaboration with the Joint Institute for Strategic Energy Analysis’s Green Computing Catalyzer, NREL researchers are building novel data sets that quantify the energetic cost of computing on NREL’s supercomputers and making them publicly accessible to help researchers inside and outside NREL build computations that balance performance and energy efficiency. Through these efforts and more, NREL and the Green Computing Catalyzer are cultivating and scaling the laboratory's green-computing capabilities to get ahead of this emerging energy challenge.

NREL Study Investigates Electric Vehicle Fast-Charging Infrastructure Needed To Enable Travel to National Parks

As electric vehicle (EV) adoption continues to increase, one source of anxiety for drivers traveling long distances is whether sufficient EV charging infrastructure will be available to offer them convenient and reliable charging. The National Park Service draws more than 80 million visitors each year to its various parks, many of which are in remote locations, a potential hurdle for EVs. To aid the National Park Service, a recent NREL study investigated the fast-charging infrastructure needed by 2030 to enable seamless electrified road trips to and from national parks and monuments in seven western states. Learn more about how NREL tools can help determine on-route EV charging infrastructure needs for long-distance travel.

New Best Practices From the Federal Energy Management Program Help Organizations Track Fleet-Associated Electricity Use

As organizations electrify their fleets, many are interested in accurately measuring and reporting the electricity used in zero-emissions vehicles and the electric vehicle supply equipment installed at their facilities. The Federal Energy Management Program is helping agencies and other organizations with this enormous task by assembling two best practice guides for tracking this electricity use: one for electricity use in electric vehicles and one for electricity use from electric vehicle supply equipment. Check out these resources and a case study of how NREL is using submeters to separately track the electricity use of its 128 electric vehicle chargers.

This Year’s Top News Stories and Downloaded Publications

News Stories

Thank you for subscribing to NREL’s Energy Systems Integration Newsletter. A lot has happened this past year. To recap, we rounded up our top stories from Fiscal Year 2023 in one can’t-miss list:

Publications

NREL’s energy systems integration researchers had another busy year of publishing groundbreaking and impactful research. The directorate’s publications logged more than 141,000 downloads this past fiscal year. See our list of the top 10 downloaded publications from Fiscal Year 2023:

Cost Projections for Utility-Scale Battery Storage: 2023 Update, NREL Technical Report
Evaluating Impacts of the Inflation Reduction Act and Bipartisan Infrastructure Law on the U.S. Power System, NREL Technical Report
2022 Standard Scenarios Report: A U.S. Electricity Sector Outlook, NREL Technical Report
PR100 One-Year Progress Summary Report: Preliminary Modeling Results and High-Resolution Solar and Wind Data Sets, NREL Technical Report
U.S. Solar Photovoltaic System and Energy Storage Cost Benchmarks, With Minimum Sustainable Price Analysis: Q1 2023, NREL Technical Report
Cambium 2022 Scenario Descriptions and Documentation, NREL Technical Report
Expanding Solar Access: State Community Solar Landscape (2022), NREL Technical Report
Status of State Community Solar Program Caps, NREL Technical Report
Moving Beyond 4-Hour Li-Ion Batteries: Challenges and Opportunities for Long(er)-Duration Energy Storage, NREL Technical Report
Materials Used in U.S. Wind Energy Technologies: Quantities and Availability for Two Future Scenarios, NREL Technical Report

NREL Annual Holiday Message

As we celebrate the holiday season, we want to express our heartfelt gratitude for your continued support and collaboration. This past year has been transformative for us, marked by significant growth in our people, infrastructure, research, and programs. As we reflect on these accomplishments, we are thankful for the dedication and passion each member of the NREL community brings to our shared mission. Happy holidays from NREL.

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Register for the Energy Transition Summit This February

Energy sector leaders are convening in Arlington, Virginia, from Feb. 5 to 8 for cross-cutting conversation on two forward-looking themes: the grid modernization initiative and clean energy cybersecurity. Engage in U.S. Department of Energy-led strategy and robust industry and research partnerships advancing a secure, resilient, and sustainable energy transition. Registration is now open.

NREL’s REopt Web Tool Helps People Across the World Evaluate Their Optimal Energy Mix

The REopt^® web tool, created by NREL and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Federal Energy Management Program, is an extremely useful resource that helps users evaluate their optimal mix of renewable energy, conventional generation, and energy storage technologies to meet cost-savings, resilience, emissions reductions, and energy performance goals. It has been leveraged by the private sector, state governments, other countries, and many others. Two new, exciting use cases for the tool have been published. Read about how REopt helped deploy microgrids to support 20,000+ people in Cameroon with clean electricity and a new analysis that looks at how the costs and benefits of distributed energy technologies are shared among building owners, homeowners, utilities, and other stakeholders.

Publications Roundup

Chapter 12. Distribution Grid Upgrades for Equitable Resilience and Solar, Storage, and Electric Vehicle Access, NREL Technical Report (2023)

The LA100 Equity Strategies project integrates community guidance with robust research, modeling, and analysis to identify strategy options that can increase equitable outcomes in Los Angeles’ clean energy transition. As Los Angeles transitions toward clean energy, existing distribution grid infrastructure will need to be updated and expanded to support reliable service during routine operations, enable interconnection with distributed energy resources and electrified loads, and provide access to energy-related services during disasters. This chapter focuses on equity in distribution grid upgrades, reliability, and resilience in Los Angeles. Visit the LA100 Equity Strategies website to view all 12 chapters of the report.

Distributed Clean Energy Opportunities for U.S. Oil Refinery Operations, Frontiers in Energy Research (2023)

The oil and gas industry is increasingly seeking operational improvements to reduce costs and emissions while improving resilience. This study describes the techno-economic analysis of opportunities for distributed energy resources that could be integrated to support oil and gas companies’ economic, environmental, and energy resilience goals. Specifically, the analysis evaluates solar photovoltaics, wind turbines, battery energy storage, landfill gas, biomass, municipal solid waste-to-energy, solar steam for process heat, combined heat and power, and electrolyzers for hydrogen production at two hypothetical refineries, one located in Louisiana and the other in Southern California. These technologies could reduce the sites’ consumption of grid electricity and/or natural gas and thus can help reduce emissions.

Peak Demand Management and Voltage Regulation Using Coordinated Virtual Power Plant Controls, IEEE Access (2023)

The aggregation of distributed energy resources enables them to provide various grid services as a virtual power plant. Utilities use enterprise control solutions, such as advanced distribution management systems and distributed energy resource management systems, to efficiently integrate distributed energy resources and realize the benefits of a virtual power plant. These control solutions can complement each other to offer additional benefits. This paper evaluates the coordinated operation of an advanced distribution management system and a distributed energy resource management system that collectively implements a virtual power plant to provide peak demand reduction and voltage regulation through the simulation of an actual distribution feeder.