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News and Feature Stories
The following news stories take an in-depth, behind-the-scenes look at how NREL is leading energy systems innovation and integration.
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December 2021
NREL’s Ted Sears Supports White House Effort To Convert Federal Fleet to Electric Vehicles
NREL fuel and vehicle regulations expert Ted Sears has been tasked by the White House's Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) to lead efforts to convert the federal fleet to zero-emission vehicles.
Resilient and Ready: NREL Helps Large Federal Campuses Examine Their Energy and Water Posture
The federal government owns or manages hundreds of thousands of federal buildings, and agencies have a vested interest in ensuring their buildings and energy and water infrastructure assets can withstand and recover from deliberate attacks, accidents, or naturally occurring hazards or incidents. With a massive portfolio of diverse assets, federal agencies are calling on resilience planning experts at NREL.
Building Better Batteries: Architecture for Energy Storage
A recent breakthrough by NREL and the University of Ulm advances the way researchers measure and analyze battery materials using an artificially generated representative architecture of a Li-ion electrode particle in sub-particle grain detail.
News Release: Researchers Publish First Comprehensive Building Stock Characterization Study for the United States
A new report and online dashboard by NREL is the first comprehensive characterization and segmentation of the U.S. building stock, providing a national typology of buildings.
In a Circular Economy, Hard Drives Could Have Multiple Lives in the Future
U.S. data storage technologies, like hard-disk drives (HDDs), contain imported rare-Earth elements in their magnets. As the demand for data storage increases, the supply of critical materials will become more limited.
College Students Team Up To Design Real-Life Geothermal Concepts
Join the NREL-administered Geothermal Collegiate Competition to win $50,000 in cash prizes this spring.
Forget Sci-Fi—This NREL Biotechnology Could Actually Help Colonize Mars
NREL scientists are working on harnessing cyanobacteria to convert growing concentrations of CO₂ in Earth's atmosphere into the same chemicals currently made from petroleum and natural gas—a step toward decarbonizing the chemical industry. With partner Nzyme2HC, they are exploring whether astronauts can use NREL's patented ethylene-emitting cyanobacteria to manufacture building materials and produce oxygen on Mars.
New Projects Move Thermophotovoltaic Technology Closer to Commercialization
Throughout the past three years, NREL has partnered with Antora Energy and MIT to engage in two separate projects in thermophotovoltaic (TPV) technology that have both led to record efficiencies of more than 35%--a very competitive level of performance.
Sharing Data in Virtual Hubs Streamlines Energy Materials Research, Spurs Collaboration
A paper co-authored by NREL researchers and others studies the success of the Energy Materials Network Data Hub—a secure, customizable scientific data sharing platform.
Machine Learning Method Could Speed the Search for New Battery Materials
To discover materials for better batteries, researchers must wade through a vast field of candidates. New research demonstrates a machine learning technique that could more quickly surface ones with the most desirable properties.
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Last Updated Aug. 20, 2025