Energy Systems Integration Newsletter: August 2024

In this edition, NREL is adapting the cybersecurity profession to meet the challenges of an evolving grid, a new test bed could help build a resilient grid, multiple NREL technologies were recognized as R&D 100 Awards finalists, and more.

Secure From the Start: A Renewed Workforce Takes on Cybersecurity

What is one service you can’t live without? Water or electricity might come to mind, so it should be worrying that in 2023, the Federal Bureau of Investigation tallied around twice as many ransomware attacks on utilities as the previous year. But despite their importance, the workforce in critical sectors is short-staffed and undertrained in cybersecurity. To reverse this trend, the U.S. government has taken steps to expand, diversify, and educate the critical infrastructure workforce, and that agenda is already in action at NREL.

New Test Bed Could Help U.S. Build a Resilient Renewable Energy Grid

The U.S. electric transmission system is not designed to ingest huge amounts of solar and wind energy flowing from remote locations, like the windy Midwest and sunny Southwest. But a new kind of grid technology could help the country better control where and how energy flows. This technology, called back-to-back medium-voltage converters, could not only help grid operators regulate power flow to avoid outages but also do so at a fraction of the weight and cost of the technology they would replace (transformers). Recently, a team of NREL researchers designed a test bed to study and improve these novel technologies to accelerate their development and help the U.S. grid evolve.

Finalists for R&D 100 Awards Show Impact in Solar Permitting, Quantum Computing, and More

Multiple NREL technologies were recognized as finalists in this year's R&D 100 Awards, with a couple related to energy systems integration: SolarAPP+ automates solar permitting, streamlining the backlog of solar system applications that limits installations across the United States, and Quantum-in-the-Loop connects quantum computers to power grid hardware for evaluating whether certain grid problems can be resolved with quantum computers. Other finalists include Pele, which simulates how fuel properties affect turbine performance, and Behavior, Energy, Autonomy, and Mobility, which is led by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and models regional transportation.

Powered By Webinar Series To Continue 

After six popular webinars, NREL’s Powered By series will continue for another 6 months. Hosted by NREL’s Grid Planning and Analysis Center, the series highlights how grid planning and analysis tools can power real-world projects. The first installment of the series saw hundreds of participants and vibrant conversations.

“Many people hear about NREL analyses and want to know if our models can be used to answer their questions,” said Grid Planning and Analysis Center Director Jaquelin Cochran. “The Powered By webinar series is intended to pull back the curtain on what powers our analyses and answer participants’ questions about how the tools can be used.”

Read more about the upcoming Powered By webinars, and register for the events that interest you.

NREL Debuts 1-MW Test Bed for Grid-Forming Inverter Research

Questions persist around how electric systems will add substantially more renewable energy devices, but a custom capability gets to the center of the problem. An NREL team successfully ran its new 1-MW hardware test bed at the annual conference of the Universal Interoperability for Grid-Forming Inverters Consortium, where visiting researchers witnessed the test bed coordinate a mini power system formed by solar and battery inverters.

“We have accomplished something truly remarkable,” said Jing Wang, the team lead. “We can now validate inverter controls and hardware for fully renewable power systems with multiple assets and at megawatt scale.”

The presentation of the new test bed was met with excitement and engagement, as attendees requested impromptu demonstrations, and the NREL team nimbly granted them. The test bed will be used by the UNIFI Consortium and other projects aimed at evaluating electrical systems powered entirely by renewable resources, specifically the grid-forming capabilities of such resources.

Read this introduction to grid-forming inverters to learn more about the importance of NREL's new capability.

Beneath the Surface: Anuj Sanghvi’s Journey From Toy Tinkerer to Cybersecurity Defender

Anuj Sanghvi’s early fascination with dismantling toys and electronics to learn how they work naturally led him to a career in engineering, but he had to train himself to be a researcher. Starting his career as a radio frequency engineer in India, Sanghvi relocated to the United States to earn a master’s degree in electrical and network engineering. The curious spark from his childhood led Sanghvi to NREL, where he now focuses on defending clean energy systems from cyber threats—a role that required him to adopt a slightly different mindset from his engineering training. Learn about Sanghvi’s journey and his lifelong curiosity that led him to NREL.

Merefa Clean Energy Microgrids in Ukraine

To bolster community resilience against power outages, NREL’s team performed an in-depth techno-economic analysis for a microgrid in Merefa. This study evaluated system component capacities, such as cycle costs, and the likelihood of maintaining critical loads while also developing an operational sequence for the microgrid. The analysis is pivotal for securing funding to bring the Merefa microgrid project to life, and it aligns with Ukraine’s Energy Strategy for 2050 by promoting the deployment of distributed energy resources and advancing clean, sustainable energy solutions. Explore the fact sheet and the presentation slide deck outlining this analysis.

Perspective Pivot: Mapping a Landscape of Voices in Oahu Changes Energy Planning

At NREL, researchers often serve as guides who help communities navigate the world of renewable energy solutions. But in community-based technical assistance projects, the guiding role goes both ways: Researchers need local perspectives to fill contextual knowledge gaps and create more meaningful energy solutions. Over the course of 6 weeks, NREL researcher Katy Waechter and representatives from the Hawaiian Electric utility and Hawaii Natural Energy Institute traveled across Oahu, Hawaii, to hear how individuals perceived independently owned hybrid microgrids.

Read about their journey and the insights they discovered that are guiding the team’s research direction to better inform Oahu-wide energy planning. 

Job Postings

Interested in joining NREL? We are rapidly growing and looking to fill a variety of positions. Following are job openings within NREL’s Energy Systems Integration team. Check out the NREL careers page to find even more opportunities and explore a future with NREL.

Publications Roundup

A Path to 100 Percent Renewable Energy: Grid-Forming Inverters Will Give Us the Grid We Need Now, IEEE Spectrum (2024)

This is a more urgent problem than it might sound. As the westernmost Hawaiian island of significant size, Kauai is home to around 70,000 residents and 30,000 tourists at any given time. Renewable energy accounts for 70% of the energy produced in a typical year—a proportion that’s among the highest in the world and that can be hard to sustain for such a small and isolated grid. During the day, the local system operator, the Kauai Island Utility Cooperative, sometimes reaches levels of 90% from solar alone. But on April 2, a 26-MW generator was running near its peak output to compensate for the drop in solar output as the sun set. At the moment when it failed, that single generator had been supplying 60% of the load for the entire island, with the rest being met by a mix of smaller generators and several utility-scale solar-and-battery systems.

Evaluation of Global Climate Models for Use in Energy Analysis, NREL Technical Report (2024)

The interplay among energy, climate, and weather is becoming more complex due to increasing contributions of renewable energy generation, energy storage, electrified end uses, and the increasing frequency of extreme weather events. Energy system analyses commonly rely on meteorological inputs to estimate renewable energy generation and energy demand; however, these inputs rarely represent the estimated impacts of future climate change. Climate models and publicly available climate change datasets can be used for this purpose, but the selection of inputs from the myriad available models and datasets is a nuanced and subjective process. In this work, the authors assess datasets from various global climate models from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6.

Impact of Electric Vehicle Charging Station Reliability, Resilience, and Location on Electric Vehicle Adoption, NREL Technical Report (2024)

Although the majority of electric vehicle (EV) charging events in the United States occur at home, issues with public charging stations are consistently found to be a top reason that potential EV buyers do not purchase an EV, demonstrating that both EV supply equipment reliability and availability impacts EV adoption. This report explores multiple parameters that impact EV supply equipment reliability and deployment, which, in turn, impact EV sales. These include extreme weather, codes and standards, region (urban versus rural), and grid network type. Grid reliability was not found to impact EV adoption. The relationships among EV station reliability, station resilience, grid resilience, and EV adoption are largely outside the scope of NREL’s Automotive Deployment Options Projection Tool and other vehicle adoption models, so the methodology of this report is varied.