Grid Integration Facilities at the Flatirons Campus

NREL's crosscutting, multimegawatt grid integration research facilities at the Flatirons Campus are providing a launch pad for industry partners to evaluate how large-scale energy systems interact with our grid as new energy technologies and the nation's grid infrastructure evolve.

Large amounts of wind and solar energy resources are increasingly being introduced to our power grid, requiring careful evaluation and validation for the secure and reliable integration of these technologies. To accommodate this growth, the Flatirons Campus 305-acre site features vast areas dedicated to existing and future grid integration facilities, providing advanced research capabilities for the integration of large-scale energy systems.

Key Capabilities

At the Flatirons Campus, researchers can configure more than 8 megawatts (MW) of installed, large-scale wind turbines, photovoltaic (PV) systems, and energy storage in a variety of ways to analyze the effects of large-scale deployment of variable generation on the grid. NREL's controllable grid interface (CGI), a 7- and 20-megavolt ampere (MVA) system, can emulate a wide range of grid conditions. The CGI is suited for grid integration research with megawatt-scale wind and PV technologies, as well as energy storage devices, transformers, and protection equipment at medium voltage.

The Flatirons Campus comprises a nationally important capability for integrating large amounts of renewable energy: The Advanced Research on Integrated Energy Systems (ARIES) platform. ARIES unites many of the capabilities listed below to validate, optimize, and visualize grid technologies before they are deployed for our partners in industry, academia, and government. With ARIES we can prove advanced control systems, study new grid designs, evaluate models of those new designs, and prepare for future power systems by emulating the world outside.

These capabilities are providing our partners in industry, academia, and government with a unique opportunity to validate, optimize, and visualize the grid integration performance of emerging energy technologies before they are deployed.

Research Focus

Grid integration research at the Flatirons Campus is focused on:

• Active power control, ancillary services, and synthetic inertia supplied by wind and solar systems
• Control systems and new plant designs for wind, solar, and energy storage
• Advanced forecasting methods for wind and solar resources, coupled with real-time system control
• Demonstration of distributed network control with autonomous energy grids
• Evaluation of dispatchable wind and solar plants coupled with energy storage
• Advanced power electronics solutions that increase electric grid flexibility, reliability, and resiliency
• Power system solutions that incorporate high-performance computing with advances in power system optimization, optimal power flow, and grid state estimation.

A Cross-Lab, Cross-Industry Hub for Innovation

This work converges cross-cutting research and development from all corners of NREL's science and technology programs into one expansive, interconnected network. For optimal performance, the site relies on NREL's brightest minds among the lab's solar, wind, energy systems integration, energy storage, power systems, and weather forecasting researchers. The site is also being expanded to include energy systems integration with advanced buildings, thermal generation, and hydrogen fuel cell technologies, enabling the real-time integration of electricity and energy systems as a paradigm for the grid of the future.

These grid-integration capabilities have become possible through a variety of partner-developed technologies, including wind turbines from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), Siemens/Gamesa, GE/Alstom, RES Americas' energy storage system, AES and First Solar PV and energy storage platforms, Schweitzer Engineering Laboratories real-time automation controller technologies, ABB, SMA and GP Tech megawatt-scale inverters, and megawatt-scale batteries from LG and Samsung.

Multilab efforts are also benefiting from the transmission-level grid integration research at the Flatirons Campus. This includes the Grid Modernization Lab Consortium, a strategic partnership between the DOE and national laboratories to modernize the nation's grid. Additionally, the Office of Science's Energy Science Network leverages ARIES to connect and bring together DOE's vast research resources, cutting-edge technologies, and talented scientists from other national labs. Together, they aim to address large-scale, emergent energy challenges.

Learn about NREL's large-scale grid integration research capabilities by downloading a map of all the capabilities.