National Renewable Energy Laboratory

Vehicle Systems Analysis

Technical Targets Tool

NREL's vehicle systems analysts developed the Technical Targets Tool to explore advanced vehicle pathways for improving future transportation energy security.

The tool focuses on sizing vehicle components to take advantage of the vehicle's unique characteristics and make the vehicle as competitive as possible. We use this level of competitiveness to estimate market penetration and project the impact on vehicle oil use.

Learn more about the tool's:

• Capabilities
• Framework
• Approach

Capabilities

The Technical Targets Tool's capabilities include:

• Finding competitive component sizes
• Comparing an advanced vehicle's market potential
• Evaluating the sensitivity of U.S. Department of Energy technical targets
• Estimating impacts on vehicle oil use
• Conducting "what if" scenarios, such as:
  • Rapidly rising oil prices
  • Incentives provided for an advanced vehicle.

Framework

The Technical Targets Tool's framework features:

• A high-level vehicle systems model (based on outputs from ADVISOR)
• A vehicle cost model (developed by Oak Ridge National Laboratory)
• A vehicle market penetration model
• A vehicle oil use estimate model (option: VISION)
• Condor for distributed computing (University of Wisconsin Madison)
• The DIRECT optimization algorithm.

Approach

Our approach using the Technical Targets Tool features a two-step process:

1. Sizing vehicle components to make the vehicle competitive.
   We use ADVISOR and an optimization algorithm—DIRECT. DIRECT tries different combinations of component sizes and control strategies that make the vehicle the most competitive possible.

2. Estimating impact on energy security through vehicle sales and oil use.
   Basically, we take the competitively sized components impact and use it to estimate potential vehicle sales and oil use.