Energy Systems Integration Newsletter: November 2019
In this edition: The DOE CyberForce Competition accelerates the next generation of energy security defenders; three NREL-led projects receive GMLC funding; new videos take us inside the visualization lab at NREL
CyberForce Accelerates the Next Generation of Energy Security Defenders
NREL hosted six university teams participating in this year's Department of Energy (DOE) CyberForce Competition. This was the first year NREL participated in the competition, which included 106 teams hosted by 10 national laboratories across the country.
CyberForce aims to inspire and develop the next generation of energy sector cybersecurity professionals. With billions of new intelligent electronics interconnected to the electric grid every year, the emerging cybersecurity workforce will play an especially important role in defending critical infrastructure. Cybersecurity Ventures predicts that by 2021 cybercrime will cost the world in excess of $6 trillion annually—and that the global shortage of cybersecurity professionals could reach 3.5 million.
Read more about the event in our NREL.gov feature article.
NREL Awards Announced in Grid Modernization Lab Call
DOE recently announced the awards for its 2019 Grid Modernization Lab Call (GMLC), with NREL participating in more than half of the awarded projects. Among the 14 projects NREL will contribute to, three are led by NREL teams. These projects will rely on NREL expertise in integrating energy systems as well as management solutions for distributed energy resources.
For more information on these NREL-led projects and the lab call, read our NREL.gov news article.
NREL Software for Solar Integration Wins R&D 100 Award
The NREL-developed software PREconfiguring and Controlling Inverter SEt-Points™ (PRECISE) has been recognized by R&D World magazine as one of the nation's 100 most innovative technologies in the past year. PRECISE was awarded alongside another winning technology from NREL, the building analysis tool ResStock™.
PRECISE was built with partner Sacramento Municipal Utility District as a response to challenges in the solar industry. As hardware costs drop, ratepayers are rushing toward solar; however, some utilities are overwhelmed by the responsibility to safely program each new solar inverter. PRECISE offers a solution to speed up inverter registrations while optimizing inverter reliability and energy savings. Following the successful demonstration on a real system, PRECISE is positioned to save solar-rich grids from hefty investments in the near future.
Read more about the recent R&D 100 winners.
Watch a 3-minute video about how PRECISE cuts costs and delays for rooftop photovoltaics.
Visualization Cave and Close-Knit Team Featured in Videos
At NREL's Energy Systems Integration Facility, terabytes of scientific data are processed around the clock, enclosed in servers, and intangible to researchers awaiting the results. Across the hall from the supercomputer, putting on funky glasses and stepping into the "cave" instantly transports users inside the data. In the visualization cave, projects are no longer lifeless computer scripts, but interactive, immersive realities.
"It's the idea that you can immerse someone in a psycho-physical environment so that they can explore their data more naturally than they can on a desktop or laptop," says Nicholas Brunhart-Lupo in a new video about scientific visualization at NREL.
The video gives a glimpse into how the engineers behind visualizations dream up their products. The cave's lead scientist, Kenny Gruchalla, explains that when working on one of the first visualizations, a layer of a solar cell, Gruchalla "effectively shrunk the PI down to the nanometer level." Shortly after entering the room, the principal investigator (PI) had a new revelation about the nature of his research.
The three-person visualization team is profiled in another recent video. The engineers break down the specialties among them and their respective roles in bringing data to life. Gruchalla explains that for scientist Kristi Potter, that specialty is data uncertainty.
"Kristi has been working on how to represent that data fuzziness to help us make better decisions," says Gruchalla.
The two videos follow the SC19 conference in Denver for scientific computing. Meanwhile, scientific visualization is claiming high importance in upcoming energy systems research—a resilience and cybersecurity monitoring tool will include a visualization platform, and a visualization tool will support a National Park Service study into park resilience from natural events.
Learn more about scientific computing at NREL.
NREL and Hewlett Packard To Partner on Artificial Intelligence in Data Center Operations
NREL has partnered with Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) on a new effort to evaluate how applying artificial intelligence in NREL's Energy Systems Integration Facility High-Performance Computing (HPC) data center could improve data center efficiency. By learning historical trends and training models to operate on real-time data collected from the systems and facilities, artificial intelligence approaches could improve HPC data center operational efficiency.
Read this NREL.gov feature article for more on the NREL-HPE partnership.
Read the HPC Wire article HPE and NREL Collaborate on AI Ops To Accelerate Exascale Efficiency and Resilience.
Building Capacity for Energy Resilience: Q&A with Sherry Stout
Sherry Stout is an engineer in the Integrated Decision Support group who specializes in addressing energy challenges in rural, remote, and developing communities. She contributes to energy resilience projects in countries and regions such as Colombia, Laos, and the Caribbean. We talked with Stout about her work and the importance of coordinated, diverse stakeholder groups in energy planning. Read our Q&A with Sherry Stout.
ARPA-E Success Story: NODES Goes from Theory, to Lab, to Live
NREL's work under the Network Optimized Distributed Energy Systems (NODES) program achieved the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) ideal: bold, creative, transformational solutions. NODES began with a unique, almost idyllic concept: to leverage existing grid flexibility to fundamentally change the way parts of the grid are operated and enable greater reliability. Now in its last year of funding, NODES has graduated from theory and simulation, to laboratory demonstration, and finally to real-world field deployment, providing a proven foundation for new avenues in grid control.
As shown in an animation produced for the 2019 ARPA-E Energy Innovation Summit hosted in Denver, the NODES algorithms coordinate autonomous decisions across thousands of connected distributed resources and loads to improve local operating conditions while providing coordinated control of these resources as a single virtual power plant that can provide strength to the grid.
Having achieved an in-lab hardware simulation of real-time distributed energy resource optimization with a record number of interconnected power devices and control hardware, the NODES architects are now proving their project on small-scale grids, including a microgrid at a vineyard in California and a zero energy district in Basalt, Colorado.
For NODES, the ARPA-E support provided a leap of faith that landed the algorithms at the center of NREL's growing research portfolio in autonomous energy grids, and it has inspired momentum in other attempts at real-time grid control. After 3 years of ARPA-E, NODES is more ready than ever to bridge basic research with industrial innovation.
NREL Analysis Team Wins Award for NASA-Sited Solar Project
Thanks in part to NREL analyses on how to optimally structure the project for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the Kennedy Space Center will now include a 500-acre solar photovoltaic plant on its western edge. The NREL analysis team received a NASA Group Achievement Award alongside developer Florida Power and Light Co. for the public-private effort to realize the power plant.
"We were fortunate to have the opportunity to provide analysis and consultation to NASA on a project requiring a different type of analysis," said Tom Harris, the project's lead at NREL.
Read more about NREL's role in the realization of this power plant.
NREL Researcher Advocates for Hydrogen as a Clean Energy Alternative
The H2@Scale Initiative, which began in 2015, brings together several dozen staff members from across 14 DOE national laboratories to evaluate the potential of hydrogen across the U.S. energy system. Newly appointed NREL Senior Research Fellow Bryan Pivovar is a champion of the initiative and believes his marketing ability helps him clarify and sell the benefits of hydrogen.
"I knew it was important that NREL take the lead in this area, but it wasn't until we were a few months into putting the story together that I began to realize how much benefit hydrogen has to offer," Pivovar said.
Read more about Pivovar and hydrogen research at NREL.
Publications Roundup: Interconnection, Reliability, and Control of Distributed Energy Resources
This paper pursues a more efficient approach to optimally controlling many distributed energy resources (DERs) in large distribution networks. The authors present an algorithm that reduces the computational complexity of dispatching DERs by converting a centrally coordinated implementation of the algorithm into an equivalent hierarchical distributed implementation. With the proposed approach, which has been published in IEEE Transactions on Power Systems, the authors ran simulations on a 4,521-node test feeder. Their results showed that the redesigned algorithm achieves a more than tenfold acceleration in finding the optimal solution without compromising accuracy and is vastly scalable to large systems.
PV Inverter Reliability Assessment: Thermal Life Model and Experimental Verification
With the cost of photovoltaic (PV) systems plateauing, new emphasis is being placed on costs related to inverters and associated power conditioning components. This NREL technical report studies the largest factor in PV inverter reliability: thermal cycling. The authors first create a real in-house inverter and then a multiphysics model of a PV inverter, along with its controllers, to verify the model. Using detailed electrothermal modeling that considers power loss, along with thermal behavior from the inverter's various components, the NREL team studied the inverter's reliability over a typical meteorological year in two regions, showing that the inverter's lifetime model was affected by 7.6% when advanced inverter voltage support was enabled, with a nonunity power factor of 0.8.
Accelerating Systems Integration Standards
The Accelerating Systems Integration Standards (ACCEL) group behind this NREL technical report has been tirelessly advancing standards that will address the important need for interconnection and interoperability requirements and conformance testing procedures for emerging grid-interactive technologies. This report details the group's leadership, collaboration, and workflow, which resulted in three key outcomes, each of which represented the consensus of hundreds of individuals across various industry groups: the publication of UL 1741 Supplement A, which outlines test standards by which inverters are certified for grid connection; the publication of Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Standard 1547-2018, which revised requirements for DER interconnections; and the upcoming publication of IEEE Standard P1547.1 (expected in early 2020), which describes test procedures designed to confirm that DERs follow IEEE 1547-2018 and benefited from laboratory validation of test procedures at the Energy Systems Integration Facility.
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