Energy Systems Integration Newsletter: May 2022

In this edition, NREL demonstrates a path forward for grid-forming inverters in disaster recovery, NREL campuses aim for net-zero emissions, a look at NREL's groundbreaking research in autonomous energy systems, and more.

Grid-Forming Inverters Used in Decentralized Disaster Recovery Demonstration

Grid-forming inverters—an indispensable technology in the evolution toward majority-renewable energy systems—can recover from outages using decentralized controls. The inverter controls enable a small-scale system to repower with local resources and reconnect with the larger grid. NREL is now completing demonstrations on a 40-inverter test bed to detail a technical path for 100% renewable recoveries.

Read the full story on this demonstration.

NREL Pledge Curbs Emissions as Part of Larger Initiative

Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm recently visited NREL's Flatirons Campus to launch the Net Zero Labs Initiative, which will see four of the 17 U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) laboratories move to net-zero emissions.

NREL Director Martin Keller said that as part of the initiative, the Flatirons Campus will reach net-zero emissions annually by the end of Fiscal Year 2023 (the first campus in DOE to achieve the feat), while NREL's South Table Mountain Campus outside Golden, Colorado, will achieve the goal 3 years later.

Learn more about the initiative and how NREL and DOE are leading the energy transformation by example.

Autonomous Energy Systems Expand Into Real-World Applications

NREL's autonomous energy systems research portfolio has had considerable commercial success for its spin-off technologies. NREL recently hosted a workshop to announce its push for strategic partnerships to further expand this research beyond the lab.

Read the full story on autonomous energy systems.

Remembering Solar Reliability Pioneer Dick DeBlasio

On April 27, NREL sadly said farewell to Senior Research Fellow Emeritus Richard "Dick" DeBlasio. Having joined the Solar Energy Research Institute (now NREL) in 1978, he served as program manager for the photovoltaics (PV) performance, reliability, and systems integration efforts. A lifelong member of the Institute of Electronics Engineers, one of his major contributions was in standards. He was instrumental in crafting the standard for how PV modules are tested for long-term reliability.

Read more about DeBlasio and his enduring impact.

Jerry Davis Named Laboratory Program Manager for the Advanced Research on Integrated Energy Systems Research Platform and the Energy Systems Integration Facility

Jerry Davis has been selected as the laboratory program manager for two of NREL's leading research capabilities: the Advanced Research on Integrated Energy Systems (ARIES) research platform and the Energy Systems Integration Facility (ESIF). In this role, Davis will join the ARIES and ESIF leadership teams in stewarding these two critical research assets, building collaboration opportunities, and expanding capabilities. He has worked at NREL since 2010, serving as the laboratory program manager for the Federal Energy Management Program and most recently as the partnership manager for NREL's defense sector work.

Read more about Davis and his new role.

Q&A With Jordan Burns: A Community-Driven Approach to Energy Resilience Solutions

Jordan Burns is a risk and resilience researcher and the subprogram lead for NREL's support to DOE's Energy Transitions Initiative. In this interview, Burns talks about how she began working in this field and the lab's community-driven approach to identify and plan clean energy and energy resilience solutions.

Read our Q&A with Jordan Burns.

NREL Work With Defense Department's Environmental Security Technology Certification Program Accelerates Priority Energy Projects

In 1995, NREL senior research advisor Jeffrey Marqusee became the first director of a brand-new U.S. Department of Defense program—the Environmental Security Technology Certification Program. Now, almost 30 years later, the program is working to identify and demonstrate the most promising, innovative, and cost-effective energy technologies and methods that address the Department of Defense's highest-priority environmental requirements.

Read more about NREL's Environmental Security Technology Certification Program portfolio.

No Time, No Chips: No Problem for NREL

To ensure NREL's high-performance computing capabilities can stay up-to-speed with the demands of the renewable energy economy, NREL staff recently deployed two groundbreaking additions to our portfolio: Swift, a computing resource designed to provide robust support specifically for the DOE Vehicle Technologies Office's portfolio, and Vermillion, an on-premises cloud resource tailored for prominent NREL projects like artificial intelligence training.

Read more about the technologies and how NREL developed and deployed them in the midst of a pandemic.

Designing Resilience for Advanced Energy Systems

Natural disasters, cyberattacks, user error, and a changing climate all present risks to critical infrastructure. NREL's energy systems experts answer communities' most urgent questions—such as, what is the likelihood of a disruptive event? Can we make our energy systems automated and self-healing? And how can investments in resilience be monetized?

Learn more about how NREL can help your community or organization in a new resilience fact sheet.

Publications Roundup

Enhanced Control, Optimization, and Integration of Distributed Energy Applications (ECO-IDEA)

Rounding out a multiyear, multipartner project funded by the Solar Energy Technologies Office, this report describes the effort to create, validate, and field test a distributed hierarchical control solution that coordinates solar devices and legacy technologies to support grid voltage.

In 3 years, the research team developed the control architecture, validated it, then field tested it on four utility feeders. For the control architecture, the researchers deployed two grid-edge technologies—NREL's real-time optimal power flow controls for solar PV inverters and a stand-alone voltage control device. These were connected to a vendor's advanced distribution management system, which used data measurements from the field along with volt-var control to send set points to the grid edge. The researchers found that coordinating solar and legacy devices was important for voltage regulation.

Methods for Translating ReEDS Solutions to Production Cost Modeling Tools

This report explains a tool to translate data from capacity expansion models to production cost models, allowing planners, policymakers, and researchers to analyze grid scenarios in greater detail without long computation times.

The tool, created by NREL researchers, translates from NREL's Regional Energy Deployment System (ReEDS) to PLEXOS, a commercial production cost model. The tool will allow users to better understand the outcomes of potential investment pathways by porting them to a model that can analyze at finer resolution. This allows users to check future reliability under diverse grid conditions and identify operational challenges at shorter timescales. The authors provide an example of the extended analyses that may be done through such a translation. They also describe assumptions for their method, data sets used, and important operational characteristics of the translations.

PV Reference Cells for Outdoor Use: Comparison of First-Year Field Measurements

PV reference cells are widely used in the industry to measure solar irradiance. However, reference cell characteristics, such as directional and spectral response, fundamentally differ from pyranometers, making the measurements between the two difficult to compare. This subcontract report from NREL's Solar Radiation Research Laboratory provides an analysis of data collected in the first year of a multiyear effort to develop guidance and recommendations for the design and use of outdoor reference cells to reduce inconsistencies and measurement uncertainty.