Energy Systems Integration Newsletter: January 2025

In this edition, the energy systems integration annual reports are now available, a new best practices guide for energy-efficient data centers is released, NREL is learning more about overcoming obstacles to interregional transmission, and more.

Our Year in Review: Energy Systems Integration 2024 Annual Reports

The new year brings a new edition of the Advanced Research on Integrated Energy Systems (ARIES) Annual Report. This report celebrates key accomplishments from 2024 and reflects on the technology trends, research and development goals, and strategic priorities that will guide the year to come. Our platform can be used to validate solutions for modernizing our energy infrastructure with cutting-edge hybrid power plants, million-node distribution management systems, and integrated demands, such as in energy-intensive industries like data centers.

Also, see the companion Energy Systems Integration Facility (ESIF) Stewardship Summary for highlights from our flagship user facility, which supported 85 public-private partnerships in 2024 across cybersecurity, hydrogen, grid control systems, energy-efficient buildings, and more. We look forward to crossing new frontiers in 2025 together.

Best Practices Guide for Energy-Efficient Data Center Design

Data centers are the heartbeat that keeps the flow of information pumping through our public and private sectors. But to process mountains of data within mere seconds, data centers consume massive amounts of energy and emit a lot of heat in the process. And as our demand for artificial intelligence and machine learning grows, so too will the energy demand placed on data centers.

The Federal Energy Management Program and experts from NREL created the Best Practices Guide for Energy-Efficient Data Center Design to address concerns about data center efficiency and how to keep them cool while running. Read key takeaways from the guide.

Planning and Development Pathways for Building Interregional Transmission

Despite the potential benefits of interregional transmission, several barriers hinder the development of these projects in the United States. As part of the National Transmission Planning Study, NREL and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory conducted a qualitative assessment to identify obstacles to build interregional transmission, explore opportunities to overcome them, and determine which organizations or system actors are best suited to lead those potential solutions. Learn more about the pathways to build more interregional transmission.

NREL's 2024 Standard Scenarios Now Available

Every year, U.S. electricity systems continue to modernize to help lower Americans' energy costs and increase energy reliability. To keep up with the rapid pace of change, NREL tracks evolutions in electricity-sector technologies, markets, and policies. The analysis is updated and released annually as a suite of forward-looking scenarios of the U.S. power sector, called the Standard Scenarios.

Vast Federal Lands Have Potential for Renewable Energy—But Only a Small Fraction Is Needed

NREL quantified the technical potential of utility solar photovoltaics, land-based wind, and geothermal energy on federal lands in the contiguous United States. NREL also studied the renewable energy capacity that could be developed on federal lands—and the associated total and direct land use—under multiple future scenarios. The study found significant renewable energy potential on federal lands, with less than 5% of that land needed for development to meet future energy demands. Read more about how federal lands could help power our energy future.

Q&A With Annabelle Pratt: Using the Beauty of Mathematics To Answer Utility Challenges

This new question-and-answer (Q&A) series introduces NREL's outstanding researchers working on Advanced Research on Integrated Energy Systems (ARIES) projects. We launch the series with Annabelle Pratt, a chief engineer in NREL’s Power Systems Engineering Center. Annabelle’s interests weren’t sparked by hands-on things like electric motors or vehicles but by the beauty of mathematics. Her career path started in South Africa as an electrical engineer, and then she moved to the United States when an opportunity arose to get her Ph.D. in power electronics. Her interests grew and evolved from power electronics, to power systems at a large scale, to energy management solutions. When Annabelle came to NREL, she found her niche in power-hardware-in-the-loop experiments, which include working on projects that use the ARIES research platform. Learn more about Annabelle’s career journey and her connection with ARIES.

NREL Community Engagement Supports Data-Driven Disaster Recovery

As extreme weather events become more frequent and destructive, energy resilience becomes a priority for any community faced with the reality of disaster recovery. NREL has been at the forefront of supporting communities in rebuilding and enhancing their energy systems for more than a decade and provides insights into effective strategies for community and infrastructure resilience. Recent projects in Guam, Alaska, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands demonstrate that although each community faces unique challenges, taking a data-driven approach and quantifying the value of resilience investment continue to be the most effective way to engage with stakeholders on resilience decision-making. Find out more about the resources and expertise NREL provides to communities interested in disaster recovery.

NREL's Greg Martin Helps Engineer Energy Integration Into the Grid

In his early days at NREL, Greg Martin worked in an unassuming office space. That was nearly 17 years ago, when he toiled without complaint in a converted garage without running water at NREL’s Flatirons Campus near Boulder, Colorado. Now he serves as group manager of the Energy Systems Integration Facility research engineering team, where he has considerably more room. At 182,500 ft², the Energy Systems Integration Facility serves as the starting point for NREL researchers interested in integrating renewable energy technologies into the grid. This year Greg is among the inaugural members of NREL’s Distinguished Member of Operations Staff.

Cybersecurity Accelerator Expands To Advance Cutting-Edge Department of Energy Innovations From Concept to Market

The transition from concept to adoption can be a difficult hurdle to overcome for emerging technologies. Commercialization costs, access to testing facilities, and scalability are all challenges that can stall or impede a technology’s journey to market. The Critical Energy Cybersecurity Accelerator™ (CECA™), managed by NREL, launched a new track to help cybersecurity technologies across the U.S. Department of Energy’s 17 national laboratories bridge the gap. This new premarket track expands on CECA's existing market-ready track and is designed to help cutting-edge cybersecurity technologies overcome these hurdles through iterative laboratory testing in realistic energy environments, commercialization support, and resources for industry engagement. The program is sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Cybersecurity, Energy Security, and Emergency Response. Read more about how CECA is accelerating both premarket and market-ready cybersecurity solutions toward market adoption.

Publications Roundup

Requirements Framework for Cyber-Informed Engineering, NREL Technical Report (2024)

In an era where cyber threats are increasingly sophisticated and pervasive, traditional engineering practices must evolve to integrate cybersecurity considerations from the outset. Cyber-informed engineering (CIE) addresses this need by embedding cybersecurity principles into the engineering life cycle, ensuring that systems are designed to be secure and resilient against potential cyberattacks. This paper aims to develop a comprehensive requirements framework for CIE, detailing how traditional requirements engineering processes can be customized to incorporate key CIE principles.

Foundation Models for the Electric Power Grid, Joule (2024)

Foundation models currently dominate news headlines. They employ advanced deep learning architectures to autonomously extract structural information from vast datasets through self-supervision. The resulting rich representations of complex systems and dynamics can be applied to many downstream applications; therefore, advances in foundation models can find uses in electric power grids, which are challenged by the energy transition and climate change. This paper calls for the development of foundation models for electric grids. The authors highlight the strengths and weaknesses amid the challenges of a changing grid. Foundation models that learn from diverse grid data and topologies, which the authors call grid foundation models (GridFMs), could unlock transformative capabilities, pioneering a new approach to leveraging artificial intelligence to redefine how we manage complexity and uncertainty in the electric grid. Finally, the authors discuss a practical implementation pathway and road map of a GridFM-v0, a first GridFM for power flow applications based on graph neural networks, and explore how various downstream use cases will benefit from this model and future GridFMs.

Probabilistic Restoration Modeling of Wide-Area Power Outage, IEEE Access (2024)

The timely restoration of electricity services following extreme weather events is crucial to maintain customer energy resilience as well as the economic and national security of the United States. Electricity restoration plans are needed to monitor multistate power restoration operations, undertake resource planning, and analyze system vulnerabilities, but these plans are proprietary to utility companies and are not readily available to first responders and decision makers. The purpose of the Restoration of Power Outage from Wide-area Severe Weather Disruptions (RePOWERD) project was to 1) determine which type of model—empirical, statistical, or probabilistic—most accurately predicts restoration times for distribution-level power outages caused by Category 2 or higher hurricanes; and 2) identify the impact on restoration times of various predictor variables, such as power outage impacts (i.e., customers impacted), storm characteristics, land use patterns, and baseline customer density at the county/service-area-level resolution.

Use of Physics to Improve Solar Forecast: Part III, Impacts of Different Cloud Types, Solar Energy (2025)

Cloud-type impacts present a great challenge to solar forecasting due to diverse and complex cloud-radiation interactions. This third part of the paper sequence seeks to address this challenge by quantifying the forecast accuracies under eight cloud types—cumulus, stratified clouds, altocumulus, altostratus, cirrostratus/anvil, cirrus, congestus, and deep convective clouds—across four physics-informed persistence models reported in Part I.

See also Part I, Use of Physics to Improve Solar Forecast: Physics-Informed Persistence Models for Simultaneously Forecasting GHI, DNI, and DHI, and Part II, Use of Physics to Improve Solar Forecast: Part II, Machine Learning and Model Interpretability.