NREL Conduit Blog

At any given time, Kauai typically has about 20,000 to 30,000 visitors—about one for every three residents—on the island.

Situated at the northwestern tip of Washington’s Olympic Peninsula, the Makah Tribe frequently experiences power outages that last from multiple hours to several days.

Aquinnah and Chilmark are two towns on the island of Martha’s Vineyard off the coast of Massachusetts.

Like many utilities, Guam Power Authority's (GPA’s) challenge is to balance affordability, reliability, resilience, modernization, and security in a transitioning energy landscape.

Tribal land holds more that 5% of the solar photovoltaic potential in the United States, according to a 2013 report by NREL.

In early December 2022, a snowstorm hit Fairbanks, Alaska, blanketing the city of around 32,000 people in six inches of snow and dumping even more on the surrounding hillsides.

In this blog, meet Kevin McCabe, a clean energy researcher who serves as the lead for NREL’s Tribal energy activities.

If NREL had to “show-and-tell” the human impacts of its work today, what would stand out? The State, Local, and Tribal Program (SLT) team’s fiscal year (FY) 2021 accomplishments would.

The ongoing 2017 Atlantic hurricane season has already been the most active since 2005. Hurricane Harvey, classified as a Category 4 storm, made landfall on the Texas Gulf Coast on August 25^th with winds topping 130 mph and inundating the City of Houston with over 50 inches of rain in some areas, claiming upwards of 30 lives. Seventy percent of surrounding Harris County was covered with more than a foot of water, which flooded roughly 136,000 buildings. 

In February, the Solar STAT blog featured a post on 2012’s Hurricane Sandy and  how solar PV can support disaster resiliency . Extreme weather events are not limited to hurricanes, of course. Others, like California’s ongoing drought, pose additional challenges for electricity generators but also demonstrate an emerging role for solar energy.