Energy Systems Integration Newsletter: October 2019
In this edition: Greentech Media's Energy Gang Podcast discusses NREL's recently commissioned bioreactor and partnership with Southern California Gas Company; Q&A with Director of NREL's Energy Security and Resilience Center John Barnett; A new video highlights NREL's hydrogen research.
Podcast Highlights Storage Solution Developing at NREL: A Microorganism Making Methane from Wind and Solar
Concerning experiments within a new 25-ft-tall bioreactor at NREL, a Greentech Media podcast cuts to the real question: Are ancient bugs the key to storing wind and solar?
The podcast takes the listener on a tour through NREL's recently commissioned bioreactor, which is ramping up research that feeds renewably produced hydrogen and carbon dioxide (CO2) to a microorganism, which then "outputs" pipeline-quality methane—or renewable natural gas. True to the podcast's question, this research is aimed at finding a solution for storing wind- and solar-generated electricity—from renewable, variable resources into the existing natural gas network.
"This is a stepping-stone to large-scale deployment," says Kevin Harrison, NREL senior engineer, in the podcast.
For this project, NREL partnered with Southern California Gas Company (SoCalGas), the largest provider of natural gas in North America, which is hoping to secure an efficient and sustainable pathway to produce renewable natural gas for their customers in Southern California. The project's other partner is Electrochaea, which holds patent rights to the microorganism and technology. Both partners are pleased with the initial results from the commissioning phase of the bioreactor's operation, which were two weeks fresh at the time of the podcast.
The research and development, as noted by Greentech's writer Stephen Lacy, aim to solve a few technological challenges, including a SoCalGas plan announced in March 2019 that aims to replace 20% of their fossil natural gas supply with renewable natural gas by 2030.
"It can utilize excess renewable electricity that may otherwise go wasted and create hydrogen, which can be used for a variety of things. And it can use CO2 from a wide range of sources as a feedstock for renewable natural gas. It's a brilliant and seemingly elegant form of energy storage," said Lacy.
In the podcast, Harrison adds to the project's appeal, describing how manageable its deployment is.
"We start with gasses, so it is a fast reaction. The organisms are self-replicating and naturally occurring, so if things were to spill or go wrong, we've essentially spilled some seawater on the ground. That's what's nice about the simplicity. It's a vessel that's operating at manageable temperatures—60°C—and manageable pressures."
The answer to Greentech Media's question will be revealed as one of the most novel storage studies gets underway. Stay tuned for future coverage of the power-to-gas research as it ramps up.
Q&A with John Barnett: Building NREL's Role in Security and Resilience
As billions of new intelligent, connected electronics enter our electric grid every year, diligent focus on cybersecurity for an evolving grid is crucial. To manage, optimize, and secure the future grid, new technologies and control techniques will be required that do not currently exist. As director of NREL's Energy Security and Resilience Center, which launched last year, John Barnett is coordinating the lab's efforts to leverage its existing research to strengthen and grow its contributions to protecting energy services against disruption.
Read our Q&A with Barnett to learn more about NREL's research in security and resilience.
New Video Shows Electrolyzers on Double Duty, Providing Both Grid Stability and Hydrogen
The growth in renewable energy is creating a mismatch between generation and demand, which can impact frequency and voltage dynamics and destabilize the grid. A new video explains how researchers are using dispersed electrolyzers to reduce grid disturbances while creating hydrogen.
The teams' work has found that electrolyzers integrated with a grid with high penetrations of renewables and baseload nuclear generation can reduce voltage disturbances up to 35% and reduce frequency disturbances by more than 30%. These improvements were validated using a commercially available 225-kW electrolyzer integrated in the Energy Systems Integration Facility along with a 1-MW grid simulator.
In the open arena of new vendor technologies, grid-stabilizing support will be a critical asset. This work elevates the role that electrolyzers could play in future systems. The NREL team is eyeing follow-up work that considers trade-offs between transmission, distribution, and hydrogen production requirements for economics, fueling demand profiles, and fuel cell electric vehicle applications.
Creating Resources for Resilience with Cable Broadband Data in New NREL Project
NREL scientists are tuning in to cable TV, and not on their off time. Cable broadband lines span approximately 95% of homes across the United States, running side-by-side with power lines, and carrying data that support power system operations. NREL has initiated a project that unites the two vast networks, focusing on communications and power quality, to achieve high-speed resilience monitoring for the grid.
The project's outcome will be a visualization tool called Situational Awareness of Grid Anomalies (SAGA), which began development this past month following the announcement of a three-year, $3 million project funded by the DOE's Office of Cybersecurity, Energy Security, and Emergency Response.
The goal of SAGA is to visualize grid events and train computers to classify them, all in near real time. This is possible through the incorporation of data from cable TV networks, which include five-minute, low-latency measurements of customer voltage from more than 210,000 sensors—an extreme improvement in resolution over existing county-level resilience tools.
Read more about the SAGA project.
NREL Researcher Champions Scientific Diversity
When he was young and growing up in Juarez, Mexico, NREL Researcher Ismael Mendoza figured that maybe he would be a mechanic like his father, or perhaps an electrician. Instead, he became an engineer working in the Energy Systems Integration Facility at NREL.
"I never thought I'd leave my town," Mendoza said.
Over the years, Mendoza has developed a passion for encouraging other Hispanic students to consider the sciences—and being of service to the cause of empowerment. In the latest chapter on that effort, Mendoza took the lead for the formation of NREL's new Hispanic and Latinx Alliance (HLA) Employee Resource Group. On September 16, symbolically aligning with National Hispanic Heritage Month (Sept. 15–Oct. 15), Mendoza hosted the first meeting of the HLA, which featured an address from ESIF Associate Laboratory Director Juan Torres.
For Mendoza, the 2017 hiring of Torres was a key moment in NREL's evolution.
"I could see the direction the lab was heading—diversity and inclusion is part of any good organization moving forward," Mendoza said.
Read more about Mendoza's history as well as diversity and inclusion at NREL.
NREL Researcher on Winning Team of First-Ever Solar Decathlon Africa
Michael Blonsky, NREL researcher and Ph.D. student in electrical engineering at Colorado School of Mines, was part of a collaborative team from Mines and two Moroccan universities—Cadi Ayyad University and the National School of Architecture in Marrakech—that won the first ever Solar Decathlon Africa event. The winners were announced on Sept. 27 in Morocco.
Eighteen teams were challenged to design and build an affordable, solar-powered, zero energy model house on-site in Morocco. The winning team, called Inter House, can still track data from the house, which is currently at a solar village at the Green Energy Park in Ben Guerir. The team hopes it will be an educational resource for both students and residents in Morocco.
"It's a great feeling to apply my research at NREL and Mines on a real, hands-on project and to present it to people from around the world," said Blonsky.
The team—which used NREL's Building Energy Optimization™ (BEopt) tool to help build their design—won $150,000, which they plan to use to help pay for expenses and provide support for students who want to compete in future Solar Decathlon competitions.
The event is a collaboration among DOE; the Moroccan Ministry of Energy, Mines, and Environment; and the Moroccan Research Institute for Solar Energy and New Energies. The Africa event is one of several international extensions of the DOE Solar Decathlon.
NREL Hosts Global Group for Calibration Event
In late September, NREL hosted 31 participants from 18 organizations from around the world for a week's worth of data collection as part of NREL's annual Pyrheliometer Comparisons (NPC). At the event, now in its 22nd year, participants set up large telescope-like instruments to measure direct-beam solar irradiance. After the event, researchers at NREL's Solar Radiation Research Laboratory analyze and produce a report on the data, which helps participants calibrate their absolute cavity radiometers to the World Radiometric Reference.
The nearly annual event has provided radiometer calibration traceability to the World Radiometric Reference for any organization that participates in the event. Participants include members of industry, academia, other DOE laboratories, federal agencies, and international organizations, such as the European Union and the World Meteorological Organization.
This year, NREL hosted its second after-dark comparison between its patented absolute
cavity pyrgeometer and the World Radiation Centre's Infrared Integrating Sphere Radiometer
as part of an effort to maintain the reference for measuring atmospheric longwave
irradiance. These data have implications for materials, renewable energy, and atmospheric
science applications and research.
A recent NREL technical report has more information on the event, including a detailed summary of data. Photos of
the event are available on the Solar Radiation Research Laboratory Flickr album and the NREL Flickr album.
Video Highlights New Master's Program from the University of Colorado Boulder and NREL
A video produced by NREL and the University of Colorado Boulder (CU Boulder) Department
of Electrical, Computer, and Energy Engineering highlights the new Professional Master's Program in Next-Generation Power and Energy Systems. The program—offered by CU Boulder and featuring instructors from NREL—offers a new
opportunity to learn about cutting-edge technology developed to make our world more
sustainable through emerging interconnected power and energy systems.
Watch the video to learn more about the program. Applications for the program, which starts in fall
of 2020, are due by Dec. 1, 2019.
NREL Proposes Key Revisions to the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Reliability Test System
Researchers from NREL, along with colleagues from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland Ltd., and Sandia National Laboratories, proposed an update to the IEEE Reliability Test System (RTS) to bring it into the 21st century. The RTS has been a key element of how engineers design software systems to study and operate the power systems of the future.
As outlined in an article in IEEE Transactions on Power Systems, the proposed 2019 RTS, or RTS-GMLC, features some critical updates to the last update of the RTS, in 1996, such as modernized sources of generation as well as geographic and temporal variability.
Read more about the updated RTS.
The Latest NREL Publications
Now that customers are both consumers and generators of electricity, their load is less predictable, and there's a need to better understand their behavior for grid planners. This paper, published in IEEE Access, introduces an efficient method for coming up with representative customer load profiles. The authors study their method on a 3,500 residential customer data set, in which data from the customers' meters were first reduced (for computational efficiency), and then sorted into relevant profiles, such as customers with and without on-site solar generation. The results of this paper provide a fast method for using customer smart meter data in distribution system planning.
Dual Inductor Hybrid Converter for Point-of-Load Voltage Regulator Modules
This paper, published in IEEE Transactions on Industry Applications, introduces a design for power converters that accommodates changing power consumption, specifically a growth in data centers. Regarding power consumption in cloud computing and big data processing, there has been a switch to a higher voltage architecture. The computer processing units of data centers, however, operate at a significantly lower voltage. The concept suggested in this paper is a power converter that maximizes efficiency and power density compared to competing designs. The authors present a pilot of their design and record 95.02% peak efficiency for the converter. With data centers expected to account for 2% of U.S. energy usage by 2020, this converter could save on costs by improving the efficiency of a fundamental asset within data center infrastructure.
FAQ Addresses Common Questions about Battery Energy Storage Systems
Is grid-scale battery storage necessary for renewable energy integration? What services can batteries provide? Where should batteries be located? These are only a few factors to consider when assessing grid-scale battery energy storage system options. The U.S. Agency for International Development and NREL address these and other common storage questions in a new FAQ that aims to answer common questions and dispel misconceptions around battery energy storage systems. The FAQ provides a technical synopsis about storage location, chemistry and sizing options, the range of services storage can provide to a power system, and the means of compensation for battery energy storage system service provision. It also offers concrete steps and case study examples that showcase how to make energy storage work for a power system, its utilities, and its customers.
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