Energy Systems Integration Newsletter: February 2020
In this edition: Hear from the women at NREL who are transforming energy, NREL invention wins award at IEEE conference, refining resilience in energy systems, and more!
Video: See How Women at NREL Are Transforming Energy
In honor of International Day of Women and Girls in Science, which takes place annually on Feb. 11, NREL created a video to showcase its own women researchers, analysts, scientists, and engineers who are positively changing how we use, make, and move energy around in the United States.
Watch the video to learn more about the women at NREL who are transforming energy.
NREL Invention for Cybersecure Communications Awarded at IEEE Conference
A cybersecurity breakthrough by an NREL team was honored at this year's IEEE Texas Power and Energy Conference. The team received the Best Paper Award for its submission, Module-OT: A Hardware Security Module for Operational Technology.
The subject of the paper, Module-OT, is a standout solution for protecting distributed energy resources (DERs). Module-OT extends the protections for DERs in the form of a hardware module that adds encryption, authentication, authorization, and user management while reducing latency.
Module-OT was invented and tested at NREL on real hardware that would be used in the field. The paper the team presented in Texas describes the encryption features that secure communications for a DER site, and it details the testing that has validated Module-OT as a functional solution to the next generation of system security.
Module-OT and the NREL team behind it represent specific leadership in the cybersecurity of distributed energy systems. NREL is also a leading force in advancing new standards for cybersecurity and for high-fidelity, cyber-physical testing of systems under cybersecurity threats.
Learn more about cybersecurity research at NREL.
Refining Resilience in Energy Systems: Q&A with Eliza Hotchkiss
Eliza Hotchkiss is a new group manager for NREL's Energy Security and Resilience Center. Her work focuses on developing resilience strategies for community, state, and federal agencies and organizations in response to threats, hazards, and vulnerabilities. We sat down with Hotchkiss to find out more about resilience and the opportunities and challenges she is excited to work on.
Read our Q&A with Eliza Hotchkiss.
Webinar To Present Solutions for Power Sector Resilience
Clean energy technical solutions can enhance resilience across the grid system to help provide more reliable power to end users. Several cutting-edge technologies and approaches—such as distributed generation, energy storage, and smart grids—are enabling countries to better prepare for and address threats to their power systems.
Join power system resilience experts in this first installment of the quarterly Resilient Energy Platform webinar series. This webinar, titled "Clean Energy Technical Solutions for Power Sector Resilience," will provide insights into how the use of clean energy technical solutions can enhance grid resilience and address power system vulnerabilities. The webinar, featuring NREL Group Manager of Cyber Security and Resilience Eliza Hotchkiss, will be held on Thursday, March 26, 2020, from 8 to 9:30 a.m. Mountain Standard Time.
A New Energy Future: Recent Article Explores Integration of Buildings
What can buildings really do for the grid? How much does cost really drive the implementation of grid services within buildings? What are the right performance metrics for a grid-integrated building?
These are some of the questions addressed in a recent publication from ASHRAE focused on the integration of buildings into the grid. Cowritten by Sheila Hayter, laboratory program manager of the Federal Energy Management Program at NREL and past president of ASHRAE, the publication—"Building Our Energy Future: Integrating with the Power Grid of Tomorrow"—addresses the considerations of energy consumption and use by residential and commercial buildings.
The article is a follow-up to a March 2019 workshop, co-hosted by NREL and ASHRAE, that addressed the quickly evolving grid-interaction needs of buildings. Noting that residential and commercial buildings consume nearly 75% of the electricity generated in the United States, the article highlights four key areas of research needs: grid services, energy efficiency, energy storage, and integration and interoperability.
Learn more about buildings research at NREL.
The Future of Renewable Hydrogen Is Bright
The hydrogen market is worth an estimated $145 billion and is growing at a rate of 25% per year, according to a recent article in Business Insider. In fact, it could increase tenfold by 2050, according to the Hydrogen Council's report Hydrogen Scaling Up. The impetus behind this growth? Renewable hydrogen and its potential to transform the future of energy, especially for carbon-intensive industries.
If hydrogen electrolysis technology uses renewable energy sources such as solar and wind, it produces renewable hydrogen, also known as green hydrogen. Kevin Harrison, a senior engineer at NREL who was interviewed for this story, noted, "deploying electrolyzers that make green hydrogen out of wind and solar electricity is becoming more and more cost-effective."
In addition to its cost-effectiveness, green hydrogen can be appealing to industries because it has the capacity to minimize their carbon footprints. It also has the potential to accelerate clean transportation and be further converted into natural gas.
Read the full article, "Shell Just Announced Plans To Build the World's Largest 'Green Hydrogen' Plant. Here's Everything You Need to Know About the $145 Billion Industry, Which Is Set To Transform the Energy Sector." on Business Insider (subscription required).
See how NREL is making a difference in hydrogen production and delivery.
Get the Latest on High-Performance Computing at NREL in the Annual Report
Housed in one of the most energy-efficient data centers in the world, NREL's high-performance computing capabilities powered groundbreaking research in 2019. From the Athena project, an effort to improve energy efficiency at transportation hubs, to advancements in scientific visualization capabilities and revolutionary research in artificial intelligence and machine learning, check out our 2019 report to see how the Computational Science Center at NREL is powering the lab's efforts to solve energy challenges.
Study Sheds Light on New IEEE Standard 1547™-2018 Categories, Showing Power System Impact
A recent report from NREL provides the first demonstration of how the revised Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Standard 1547-2018 can impact the stability of a power system. The study also provides insight into how various regions in the Western Interconnection might need to approach specific categories of the standard.
The report, Simulating Distributed Energy Resource Responses to Transmission System-Level Faults Considering IEEE 1547 Performance Categories on Three Major WECC Transmission Paths, compares the response of approximately 9 GW of DERs to transmission-level faults under the 2003 and 2018 editions of the IEEE 1547 standard. Results indicate that not only are DERs important to the recovery of power system stability following a fault event but also DERs implementing IEEE 1547-2018 voltage ride-through performance categories can avoid the loss of significant amounts of generation, which is conducive to increased grid reliability and resilience.
Read the full NREL article on this study.
Learn more about grid standards work at NREL.
New NREL Initiative Releases Request for Information
NREL is seeking input from industry, academia, research laboratories, government agencies, and other stakeholders for a new research platform. The Advanced Research Integrated Energy Systems is a research platform designed to de-risk, optimize, and secure current energy systems and provide insight into the design and operation of future energy systems. This unique asset integrates real equipment and devices, emulated devices, hardware-in-the-loop experiments, high-performance computing, and assets at other national labs to allow full experimentation of integrated energy systems at a scale that replicates the real world.
To provide feedback on the research and development needs for this initiative, see the request for information.
Video: NREL Engineer Talks Buildings with Housing Innovation Alliance
NREL Senior Research Engineer Bethany Sparn recently welcomed the Housing Innovation Alliance to the ESIF to talk about how research at NREL is impacting the residential building market of the future.
"The thing that is really exciting to me about residential buildings … is that we are moving to a place where buildings are going to be more integrated with the utility," Sparn says in the interview. "They're going to be more responsive and flexible."
Watch the video to learn more about how NREL researchers are integrating residential appliances with other DERs.
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