Energy Systems Integration Newsletter June 2019

Researcher Tests Battery Diagnostic Tool; Q&A with Group Manager Santosh Veda; ARPA-E Energy Innovation Summit Comes to Colorado, NREL

NREL Researcher Ying Shi Testing Battery Diagnostic Tool

What if you could diagnose a “sick” battery? Energy Storage Systems Engineer Ying Shi of NREL’s power design and planning group is using the ESIF to test a new diagnostic system from Feasible, Inc. on large-format batteries.

The ultrasound-based hardware-software diagnostic system has so far only been tested on small, flexible batteries used in lightweight applications like drones. The ESIF will allow Shi and her team to test the tool on large-format batteries more suitable for commercial use.

The testing is part of the Shell Game Changer Accelerator Powered by NREL (GCxN) program, which helps bring emerging technologies to the market. You can read more about the project on the GCxN website.

Q&A with Santosh Veda

What was the allure of NREL for you?

A couple things. I studied at Virginia Tech, the alma mater of a couple other great NREL scientists (Benjamin Kroposki and Yingchen (YC) Zhang, to name two). For my thesis I studied application of PMUs for improving the reliability of the grid, similar to YC’s thesis. With PMU’s, you can bring in measurements from all over the grid, over one hundred times a second, greatly improving our awareness of what’s happening on the grid spanning an entire continent.  

After school I worked at GE’s corporate research center in New York. My previous manager, Murali Baggu, and I used to work together. He moved to NREL and then invited me, but I was quite happy with GE. Murali insisted: “Come visit! what’s the worst that can happen?” I knew it was a great place, but when I visited and met my current team, that changed everything for me. When I saw the breadth of work going on here and the passion for mission, I decided to make the switch.

Do you feel like you've found your niche at NREL?

I definitely think so. I strive for technology innovation that solves critical energy problems, and I’m a people-person and a huge spokesperson of NREL’s mission. In my current new role, I work with a team of highly-skilled and very passionate researchers and we work together on achieving our vision. My contribution is bringing a customer-centric mindset to our team, which is a unique perspective. When a stakeholder is involved, I treat them with a customer-first attitude—something I learned from GE. Something else I bring from GE is working across siloes and technical domains. I’ve worked on developing technologies for mining electrification, distribution grid, microgrids and transmission technologies. Consequently, some of my current research is based on integrating new technologies onto the grid, and identifying adjacencies and synergies.

What sort of projects have you been working on? What's in the pipeline?

We have been working with utilities and vendors in the electrical industry, from across the country. An example of a strategic partnership project is with Xcel Energy. It’s a unique project—we’re trying to address the problems that are plaguing adoption of ADMS. The utilities spend tens of millions of dollars trying to fix that model quality. The model quality impacts the effectiveness of an ADMS deployment – if the models are bad, the control decisions may be suboptimal. We want to find the sweet spot, where you do just enough data verification without affecting the ADMS performance; it helps cut costs for data management.

Another exciting project I am working on is fleet electrification project. We are looking at developing a co-optimization platform for integrating fleets, not passenger vehicles, of electric vehicles accounting for battery degradation, optimal DER sizing, utility costs and grid impacts. For this project, I led an industry advisory board meeting onsite at NREL. The industry advisory board brings in critical stakeholders : like fleet owners like Amazon and Walmart, vendors like Eaton, utilities from around the country and infrastructure owners like ElectrifyAmerica, etc. We’re looking at the economics—optimizing over the entire lifecycle.

How do you want to grow as a scientist?

The first thing—and I believe it’s the case for most people—I want to be in a position where I learn. That’s what motivates me the most. When I stop learning, that’s when I know I need to move on.

The second is the reason that I got into power systems in the first place. India was chronically short in energy and power. Growing up, I was witness to frequent blackouts and brownouts. I wanted to fix that problem. I believe more and more that sustainable energy is the silver bullet for a lot of the problems we see around the world: poverty, food, and water. The question is finding a place and position where I can bring the biggest impact—I’m happy to wander and integrate myself wherever… wherever I’ll have the greatest impact.

What are your interests outside of NREL?

I’m really motivated to help STEM reach schools. I’ve always volunteered at schools and am particularly active in a program called Junior Achievement. It’s about financial literacy and making sure kids stay in school. I connected NREL with Junior Achievement, and we now have an active relationship. I’m also a board of director for the Colorado Science and Engineering Fair.

The other is hiking, or rather, wandering. I like climbing Colorado’s fourteeners, and I enjoy spending a night before and after each fourteener to visit the town and get to know the local culture and people. One reason I love to hike is from my experience on the Camino de Santiago in Spain, where I walked the last two hundred miles or so. I was in a country where I didn’t know the language and was all by myself. But everywhere I went, I was greeted and made to feel at home. Everyone considered me a part of this big Camino family. It was a beautiful walk. Now whenever I travel to a new city, I just strap myself a day bag and walk around the city and visit the local places. I love to wander.

Inside HPC Epic Road Trip Stops at NREL

Inside HPC stopped at the ESIF in May and talked to NREL's Director of Computational Science Steve Hammond about high-performance computing at NREL. Hammond discussed Eagle, NREL's newest supercomputer, the liquid cooling system in the ESIF, and visited the ESIF's Insight Center for a demonstration of NREL's 3D visualization capabilities.

“I was very impressed and excited by what I saw at NREL,” said Dan Olds, an Industry Analyst at OrionX.net, who represented Inside HPC during the visit.

Read more about the visit and about HPC at NREL.

NREL Research Engineer Profiled by Windpower Engineering & Development

Jennifer King, a research engineer who works at the National Wind Technology Center, was recently profiled by Windpower Engineering & Development for their June edition. The profile highlights King's work on advancing control strategies to improve the performance of wind farms.

Read the full profile on King. 

Xcel Energy's Beth Chacon Talks About Working with NREL

Got a minute? Check out this short video featuring Beth Chacon, Director of Grid Storage and Emerging Technologies at Xcel Energy. Chacon talks about how working with NREL is helping Xcel Energy better integrate emerging technologies on to the grid and prepare for potential impacts.

The ARPA-E Energy Innovation Summit Comes to Colorado, NREL

Denver, Colorado will host the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE's) ARPA-E Energy Innovation Summit from July 8-10, the first time the event has been held outside of Washington D.C.

The 2019 Summit is a conference and technology showcase that brings together experts from different technical disciplines and professional communities to think about America's energy challenges in new and innovative ways. Now in its 10^th year, the Summit offers a unique, three-day program aimed at moving transformational energy technologies out of the lab and into the market. In conjunction with the event, NREL is hosting an Innovation Workshop for Summit attendees. This three-hour lab immersion includes presentations by NREL leaders, a demonstration-style science and technology showcase, lab tours, and the chance to network with NREL scientists and experts who are transforming energy.

Visit the event site for more information and to register.

Jobs at NREL

Interested in joining NREL? We are growing quickly and looking to fill a variety of positions. Check out the NREL careers page to explore a future with NREL!

R3873 – Research Engineer III—Energy Optimization Model Development

R4426 – Engineer for Energy Informatics and Optimization of Dispatchable Technologies

R4625 – Engineering Project Manager—Ports and Airports

R4766 – Federal Energy Procurement Specialist

R4768 – Federal Energy Procurement Specialist

R4816 – Project Manager II—DoD Support

R4820 – Project Manager III—DoD Support

R4821 – Project Manager IV—DoD Support

NREL's Juan Torres Talk to Colorado Public Radio About Renewable Energy and Grid Modernization

Colorado is working to increase the state's reliability on renewable energy and achieve aggressive renewable energy targets. However, the current grid was not designed to handle the fluctuating energy provided by renewables.

More solutions are needed to update the grid to make the state's goals a reality. One NREL study proposes high voltage direct current transmission lines – estimated to cost about $70 billion – as a possible fix.

“You have to work within the constraints of the culture and what the people in the region, what their appetite is,” Juan Torres, associate lab director for the Energy Systems Integration Facility at NREL, told Colorado Public Radio.

Read the full article on the Colorado Public Radio website.

Annual User Call Opening Soon

As a state-of-the-art user facility, demand for laboratory space and equipment in the ESIF continues to grow. A majority of laboratory resources are allocated to users on an annual cycle through the Annual ESIF User Call. Researchers with mission-aligned projects may apply for access to ESIF laboratory capabilities between July 8 and August 30, 2019. For any questions, or to be added to a distribution list for information and an invitation to the upcoming webinar, please contact userprogram.esif@nrel.gov with your name and email address. Stay tuned to the ESIF website for the user call!

New NREL Publications

On the Convergence of the Inexact Running Krasnosel'skii-Mann Method

NREL's Andrey Bernstein and frequent collaborator (and former NREL researcher) Emiliano Dall'Anese have achieved another theoretical breakthrough at the foundations of power system control, with relevance to many broader problems. This paper, published in IEEE Control Systems and Letters, advances the state of the art for optimizing changing systems—say, optimizing the moment-to-moment voltage conditions across a distribution system. Specifically, their work studies how good and fast such optimization algorithms will track optimal solutions.

Online Optimization as a Feedback Controller: Stability and Tracking

In a similar focus to the above publication, and from the same authors (plus NREL's Marcello Colombino), this work considers time-varying optimization problems. In this paper, which published in IEEE Transactions on Control of Network Systems, the authors propose an algorithm that uses feedback from a system to find solutions to optimization problems about that system. Their algorithm finds these solutions without assuming any further knowledge about disturbances to the system. Their paper also presents an application of the algorithm in power systems: The algorithm successfully generates changing operational settings for power generators.

Reducing PV Performance Uncertainty by Accurately Quantifying the PV Resource

A new NREL technical report extends the functionality of the NREL-developed, best-in-class solar radiation model named FARMS (the Fast All-Sky Radiation Model for Solar Applications). The authors, who had previously developed record speed and accuracy of solar modeling through the FARMS model, have built off of the model to include solar radiation modeling on tilted surfaces (i.e., on a tilted solar panel). The new development, named FARMS-NIT (with Narrowband Irradiances on Tilted surfaces), is a computationally efficient and highly accurate method to compute the amount of solar energy incident on a panel, whether in the presence of clouds, or scattered by atmospheric conditions. The authors also present a validation of their model using surface observations and other often-used models of solar radiation.