NREL Partnerships Are Transforming Energy in Aviation (Text Version)

This is the text version of the video NREL Partnerships Are Transforming Energy in Aviation.

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>>Bill Farris, Associate Laboratory Director, National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL): NREL is a fantastic research and development laboratory. Our goal is to create a clean energy future for the world.

>>Brett Oakleaf, Strategic Partnership Manager, NREL: The lab offers a unique set of capabilities that are not found within industry, and that's why many people come to the lab.

>>Jaqueline Cochran, Director of the Grid Planning and Analysis Center, NREL: Our industry, our community, our government partners bring to us a set of questions and challenges that they're facing, and it helps us tune our research to be able to meet those research questions. And it's exciting for us because our researchers want to have impact. And what better way to have impact than working with our partners on a particular challenge?

>>Farris: Partnerships are incredibly important to the laboratory. We create the innovations in the laboratory, and we want to move those to broadscale adoption. We do that through our partners—they'll do the hard work of commercializing the technologies and creating a new energy future for the planet.

>>Doug Arent, Executive Director of Strategic Public-Private Partnerships, NREL: We have conversations with folks from the transport industry, the power industry, the chemicals and fuels industry, the natural gas and oil industry. And all of them see the business case for themselves and the business opportunity from their lens, but they don't realize the critical synergies and intercomplexities. And that's our role—is to pull that ecosystem together and to—I call it “synchronize” the co-development of clean solutions that are scalable and profitable with those companies.

>>Alicen Kandt, Senior Research Engineer, NREL: We do a lot of work with ports and airports and sustainable aviation research tied to things like sustainable biofuels, and it's really critical for the work that we do and for supporting NREL's vision of a clean energy world.

>>Cochran: We know that as you electrify different parts of the airport and change around the fuel delivery systems with airplanes—that affects what the grid needs to provide to be able to make sure that airports have the electricity they need at all times.

>>Kandt: Studying solutions to improve resilience. So, those could be via microgrid solutions, distributed energy technologies, advanced energy efficiency technologies—and then we're doing a lot with electrification.

>>Arent: We think about electrification, as well as sustainable aviation fuels—SAF as it's called—we now think about it as a whole ecosystem.

>>Cochran: We bring such amazing minds, such amazing computing power, modeling data sets, experience from other sectors that can really bring to bear on the questions about sustainable aviation. And it's that level of detail from our partnerships that really bring to life our research.

>>Oakleaf: This is such a large lift that we really need to have all the partners—whether public or private—across the aviation sector and stakeholders to really work together in a coordinated fashion to address and implement those solutions going forward.

>>Farris: The transition is upon us. What we might have done 20 years ago in terms of aviation is changing very rapidly. New technologies are coming online and giving us the opportunity to really make aviation much more sustainable.

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[Text on screen: NREL: Transforming Energy.]