Powered By Webinar Series

Each month, the Powered By webinar series features an NREL grid planning and analysis tool and the ways it can be used to solve power grid challenges.

Powered By series is a monthly informational webinar series brought to you by NREL’s Grid Planning and Analysis Center (GPAC). This series will walk attendees through NREL’s impressive suite of grid planning and analysis tools to better understand their capabilities and applications.

The series launched in March 2024 and will take place from 10 to 11 a.m. MT on the second Tuesday of every month. Each webinar will feature a different tool in the context of a real-world project. When possible, sessions will include partners from industry and government who have used the tools to inform their grid planning. Attendees will have the opportunity to engage directly with presenters to get their questions answered.

The Powered By series is designed to be relevant to anyone who works in the clean energy space and is interested in grid-related topics. State and local governments, regulators, nongovernment entities, research institutes, the renewable energy and utility industries, and more can gain useful information for their various grid-planning and analysis needs. Registration is now open and can be completed using the form below.

Webinar Topics

NREL’s PRECISE™ interconnection tool was developed in partnership with Sacramento Municipal Utility District, where it was deployed in 2022. PRECISE automates holistic distributed energy resource interconnection studies for distribution utilities by leveraging diverse utility datasets.

This presentation took place on March 12, 2024, and included NREL power grid researchers Killian McKenna and Darice Guittet and the principal electrical distribution engineer at Sacramento Municipal Utility District, Sheikh Hassan. To learn more, watch the March 12 webinar recording on YouTube.

DISCO is a Python-based NREL software tool for conducting scalable, repeatable distribution analyses. Although DISCO was originally developed to support photovoltaic impact analyses, it can also be used to understand the impact of other distributed energy resources and load changes on distribution systems.

This presentation took place on April 9, 2024, and included NREL power grid researchers Sherin Ann Abraham and Shibani Ghosh.

ReEDS™ is NREL’s flagship capacity planning model for the power sector. The model simulates the evolution of the bulk power system—generation, transmission, and storage—from present day through 2050 or later. The ReEDS model informs a range of electricity sector research questions. These include clean energy policy, renewable energy integration, technology innovation, and other forward-looking generation and transmission infrastructure issues.

This presentation will include NREL power grid researcher Stuart Cohen.

NREL's Sienna modeling framework effectively builds, solves, and analyzes the scheduling problems and dynamic simulations of quasi-static infrastructure systems. It uses a modular framework to answer different questions about future energy systems, fundamentally advancing the nation's ability to model individual and integrated infrastructure systems at a range of spatial and temporal scales.

This presentation will include NREL power grid researcher Clayton Barrows.

NREL's demand-side grid (dsgrid) toolkit harnesses decades of sector-specific energy modeling expertise to understand current and future U.S. electricity load for power systems analyses. The primary purpose of dsgrid is to create comprehensive electricity load data sets at high temporal, geographic, sectoral, and end-use resolution. These data sets enable detailed analyses of current patterns and future projections of end-use loads.

This presentation will include NREL power grid researcher Elaine Hale.

Cambium data are publicly available and include modeled hourly emission, cost, and generation metrics for a range of possible U.S. electricity sector futures, projecting out through 2050. The granular metrics illuminate trends across the ongoing changes in the power sector. Cambium can support anyone who is making decisions about the future power grid or grid-connected systems but may not have time or expertise to do the modeling themselves.

This presentation will include NREL power grid researcher Pieter Gagnon.