News Release: R&D 100 Awards Honor Two NREL Innovations

Oct. 21, 2021 | Contact media relations

R&D World magazine today presented the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) with two of its annual R&D 100 Awards for research innovations.

Including this year’s winners, NREL has received 71 R&D 100 awards since 1982.

Given annually, the R&D 100 Awards honor the 100 most innovative technologies of the past year and are chosen by an independent panel of judges. WTWH Media LLC, the Cincinnati-based publisher that oversees the awards, announced the winning NREL technologies:

dGen™ is an open-source software that simulates customer adoption of distributed energy resources (DERs) through 2050. Used by government and grid planning organizations to predict future energy systems at high spatial resolution and under diverse scenarios, dGen is an engine for equitably and cost-effectively integrating more DERs.
Wave Energy Converter Simulator (WEC-Sim) is the first open-source code allowing wave energy developers to simulate WEC dynamics and performance—dramatically reducing the uncertainty around how WECs will perform in real-world marine environments—which lowers costs and reduces R&D cycle time in this pivotal and growing field. WEC-Sim was developed in collaboration with Sandia National Laboratories.

NREL is the U.S. Department of Energy's primary national laboratory for renewable energy and energy efficiency research and development. NREL is operated for the Energy Department by the Alliance for Sustainable Energy LLC.