Energy Systems Integration Newsletter: November 2020

In this edition, a new standard and scale for grid research, a real-life demonstration of NREL's microgrid research, workshops in advancing grid control, and more.

Synthetic Data Sets Set New Standard in Energy Systems Research

Energy system data sets—despite being a wellspring of innovation on the grid—are somewhat elusive. They are either confidential and limited in application or highly simplified and limited in accessibility. To provide a new standard and scale for grid research, NREL researchers have created Synthetic Models for Advanced, Realistic Testing: Distribution Systems and Scenarios, or SMART-DS, a software that generates near-replica data sets of energy systems. To date, SMART-DS has helped produce a full replica of Texas' power system and has been used in several projects that study large-scale effects of grid integration. Now it is on track to become the new standard in power systems data.

Read the full story on SMART-DS.

ARIES Microgrid Infrastructure Powers NREL Campus through Outage

A cornerstone of NREL's latest investment and initiative, the Advanced Research on Integrated Energy Systems (ARIES) research platform, is resilience—the ability to adapt and recover from unexpected events. But resilience became more than a research objective for NREL when a mechanical device failure cut power to the entire Flatirons Campus. Surrounded by megawatts of wind turbines, solar arrays, and energy storage, NREL was put in a position to trust its own research and repower its facilities with a microgrid. In the first unexpected use case of ARIES, an agile team harnessed local renewable resources to black start the campus and validate its research mission.

Read the full story on ARIES.

NREL Workshops Highlight New Research in Advanced Grid Control

On Nov. 9 and 10, NREL virtually hosted two workshops demonstrating its latest research findings on the use of Advanced Distribution Management Systems (ADMS) for modern energy systems. Sponsored by the Department of Energy's (DOE's) Office of Electricity's Advanced Grid Research Program and DOE's Solar Energy Technologies Office, the events brought together representatives from electric utilities, the national labs, ADMS and utility control equipment vendors, and consultants to discuss the latest in ADMS capabilities and future uses of the technology.

The first workshop focused on NREL's ADMS test bed and provided an overview of the capabilities of the test bed. The workshop also featured use cases and data from projects that have used the test bed, including the Basalt Vista Affordable Housing Community, a collaborative project between NREL and Colorado utility Holy Cross Energy, which used the ADMS test bed to develop a net-zero housing community, demonstrating a real-world application of NREL's autonomous energy grids research.

The second workshop, titled Architectures for Grid-Edge Management, presented two architectures for the management of distribution systems that are being developed through two DOE-funded projects: the Enhanced Control and Optimization of Distributed Energy Applications (ECO-IDEA) project and the Federated Architecture for Secure and Transactive Distributed Energy Resource Management Solutions (FAST-DERMS) project.

Funded by DOE's Solar Energy Technologies Office through the Enabling Extreme Real-Time Grid Integration of Solar Energy program, ECO-IDEA aims to help utilities optimize systems with high penetrations of distributed energy resources (DERs) using both legacy assets and new grid-edge devices, seamlessly integrating multiple voltage-regulation technologies. FAST-DERMS, funded by the Buildings Technology Office and the Office of Electricity through the Grid Modernization Laboratory Consortium, enables the provision of reliable, resilient, and secure distribution and transmission grid services through scalable aggregation and near-real-time management of utility-scale and small-scale DERs.

Watch the use case demonstrations of NREL's ADMS test bed that were shared as part of this year's workshop.

NREL Supports 2020 CyberForce Competition, Providing Continued Mentorship to Aspiring Cybersecurity Professionals

Prioritizing participants' health and safety, college students competed individually and virtually in this year's DOE CyberForce Competition. Several staff members from NREL's Secure Cyber-Energy Systems group volunteered again—this time remotely—responding to service tickets submitted to the competition's Help Desk, leading red team pods (aka the “bad guys”), and reviewing the cyber solutions submitted by students to review, monitor, and defend the local infrastructure of a fictitious U.S. wind power plant. The national winner of this year's event was Seth Manesse from Utah State University, with Michael Roberts from University of Central Florida coming in second place. See the full list of CyberForce 2020 winners.

Through the CyberForce competition, DOE works to increase hands-on cyber education to college students and professionals, increase awareness of the critical infrastructure and cybersecurity nexus, and improve the basic understanding of cybersecurity within real-world scenarios. To make up for the usual in-person, student-to-mentor interaction, NREL held two virtual mentoring sessions before the competition, inviting students to join for an open discussion on what it's like to work in the cybersecurity field and for a national lab. Hear from the mentors by viewing our Meet an NREL Cybersecurity Expert video series.

New Environmental Security Technology Certification Program Research Shows Using Battery Storage in Military Microgrids Adds Cost-Effective Energy Security

U.S. military bases are increasingly looking toward battery storage combined with DERs as solutions for enhancing energy security, and the U.S. Department of Defense Environmental Security Technology Certification Program (ESTCP) is conducting research and development of these renewable technologies for military use. A new report to the U.S. Department of Defense summarizes ESTCP's inquiries into the effectiveness of battery energy storage systems to increase energy in military microgrids. ESTCP selected five organizations—Ameresco, Electric Power Research Institute, Raytheon, Southern Research Institute/Arizona State University, and NREL—to conduct modeling assessments of battery energy storage systems deployed in microgrids at military installations, including Fort Bliss, Naval Air Station Patuxent River, and Holloman Air Force Base.

The teams modeled overall cost and reliability of baseline microgrids at the military bases using installation-specific data such as critical and noncritical loads, solar PV energy production, utility rates, and the size of emergency diesel generators. The report finds that using battery energy storage systems with military microgrids does increase energy reliability and lowers lifecycle costs and that the unique contexts of mission needs should be considered for military leaders balancing performance and cost trade-offs of battery storage systems.

Q&A with Tarek Elgindy: Building NREL's Expertise in SMART-DS

Joining NREL as a summer intern in 2015, Tarek Elgindy has since become a principal engineer in developing SMART-DS through the Power Systems Engineering Center. Elgindy spoke with us about his journey at NREL and how SMART-DS is producing gargantuan modeling data that will help the 100-year-old electrical grids integrate safely with today's DERs.

Read the full Q&A with Tarek Elgindy.

NREL Capabilities Accelerate Integration of Electric Vehicles

Inside NREL's Energy Systems Integration Facility (ESIF) is the Electric Vehicle Research Infrastructure evaluation platform, a unique capability that makes it possible to investigate strategies to manage the grid impacts of electric vehicle (EV) charging. This is one of the ways that NREL is exploring EV grid integration as part of the ARIES initiative to accommodate increased commercial and consumer EV demand.

Learn more about how NREL is preparing the grid for increased EV integration.

NREL, ESIF Affirm Best-In-Class Status in International Organization for Standardization Audit

A recent International Organization for Standardization (ISO) audit of NREL commended the ESIF, finding no opportunities for improvement and no items of nonconformity. The ESIF obtained three certifications in quality and health and safety. The audit specifically commended the facility for its process mapping, stakeholder feedback surveys, and time saving. The results of the audit affirm the facility's commitment to its stakeholders and validates its best-in-class facility mission.

Battery-Electric Buses in Mexico City Are a Path toward Carbon Dioxide Reduction

As Mexico explores ways to reduce emissions of public transportation, trading in diesel-powered buses for electric counterparts may be a solution. In new research published in the 2020 IEEE Transportation Electrification Conference and Expo Proceedings, researchers at NREL have found that using battery-electric buses in Mexico City could provide the near-term benefit of reducing CO₂ by up to 75% and more as the electric grid gets greener.

Through its partnership with U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), NREL researchers in the Center for Integrated Mobility Services worked with the cities of Mexico City and León, Mexico, to evaluate the real-world performance of conventional buses and analyze the potential for replacing those buses with battery-electric models.

Because buses are so heavy and have a wide range of operation, measuring their energy consumption is challenging. To accomplish this task, researchers installed GPS devices on 26 diesel-powered buses at three bus depots, one large depot in Mexico City and two smaller ones in León. In 2 months, 14 million data points and 65,000 km of driving data were collected from the GPS instruments.

Using NREL's Future Automotive Systems Technology Simulator (FASTSim), along with real-world data from NREL's Fleet DNA: Commercial Fleet Vehicle Operating Data, researchers were able to develop detailed performance data from the buses, including engine speed, power, and energy use as well as run scenarios accounting for varying numbers of passengers. This high-power data synthesis showed that the buses in Mexico City would be the best candidates for electrification because of their low fuel economy, low speeds, numerous stops, and frequent idling times.

Results of the study demonstrate that the deployment of battery-electric buses in Mexico City could increase their fuel economy by five times over diesel fuel consumption based on the current electric grid emissions, which would result in a 75% decrease in CO₂ emissions with further reductions coming from greener electricity sources. Correspondingly, battery-electric buses in León—where buses are smaller and routes are shorter—could also improve fuel economy by 2.5–3.5 times and achieve a 45%–55% reduction in CO₂. Such analysis provides potential for widespread transit electrification using low-cost GPS sensors.

Publications Roundup

New Modeling Research Reduces Uncertainty in Predicting Short- and Long-Term Energy Loads

Maintaining a sturdy, resilient, and affordable electric grid requires accurate prediction of near- and long-term loads, which means more than simply knowing the shape of customers' distributed energy load profiles—whether they have solar photovoltaics (PV), storage, or PV with storage. Reducing uncertainty in the prediction of energy use at regular times is challenging because load profile simulations rely on general modeling data and do not account for the real-world variability of building occupants using energy.

New research published in Renewable Energy Focus finds that uncertainty in cost-optimal DER configuration and storage sizing can be reduced to a more acceptable range by employing a more robust set of metrics. NREL researchers used DOE's Commercial Reference Building data set and NREL's REopt™ Lite DER optimization engine to model both metered loads and similarly scaled simulations of loads for all 16 of Commercial Reference Building's reference building profiles at 65 sites with realistic utility rates. Researchers were able to use DOE's publicly available data to predict more realistic energy use patterns and building operation schedules at daily and seasonal time periods, which will provide building managers, developers, and other energy stakeholders with reliable information to assess the benefits of deploying DERs.

Autonomous Energy Grids: Controlling the Future Grid with Large Amounts of Distributed Energy Resources

Autonomous energy grids has emerged from NREL as a theoretic framework for the future grid into a significant body of research within NREL and beyond. In this feature coverage for IEEE Power and Energy Magazine, NREL authors summarize the pillars of autonomous energy grids and how they relate to controlling the future grid with large amounts of DERs. The graphic-rich article walks through the functional requirements for an autonomous grid—real-time operation, hierarchical communications, asynchronous data management, and control architectures that are robust and scalable—and how NREL is leading this research direction. The article concludes by describing NREL's record-setting simulations on real devices and foundational research across scientific domains and suggests next steps toward realizing autonomous energy grids on real systems, including market-based mechanisms to facilitate autonomous energy exchange.