Work With Us

With material designed in house, NREL has designed new turbine blades that could be more hardy and recyclable. To validate it, researchers installed the blades on a tidal turbine Verdant Power deployed in New York’s East River. Watch the video about NREL's work with Verdant Power on tidal turbines.

“We couldn’t be doing this without the, really, the strength of our collaboration with our partners. Verdant Power, in particular. We’re also working with other national labs … to answer a range of questions on this project,” said NREL’s Levi Kilcher. “And, of course, we couldn’t be doing this without DOE support.”

"Together with the [U.S.] Department of Energy’s Water Power Technologies Office and NYSERDA, Verdant Power will be helping build sustainable communities and solving some of marine energy’s biggest challenges,” said John Banigan, CEO of Verdant Power.

NREL has worked with the small Alaskan village of Igiugig as well as Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratories to help it characterize its energy resources. With contract help from TerraSond Limited, Ocean Renewable Power Co., and Integral Consulting, the team collected data to identify renewable energy systems to cut down on issues of unreliable and costly energy. Watch the video about collecting data in Cook Inlet.

"It's a huge amount of power that we have access to at our doorstep," said Chris Rose, executive director of the Renewable Energy Alaska Project, a nonprofit that advances clean energy solutions for Alaska. "The economic and environmental benefits would be immense."

The DOE Water Power Technologies Office Testing Expertise and Access for Marine Energy Research (TEAMER) program pairs promising marine energy startups with experts at national laboratories, universities, and other partners in the TEAMER network. So far, NREL has supported 15 of 71 TEAMER projects. Watch the video about NREL’s validation capabilities.

“TEAMER enables us to work with industry and apply our simulation software to real-world applications,” NREL’s David Ogden said. “It's a symbiotic relationship. They benefit from this programming. We benefit from having a better understanding of what the industry needs.”

NREL is helping isolated communities such as Dillingham and Ouzinkie, Alaska, and Eastport, Maine, harness reliable and resilient water power by partnering with DOE through its Energy Transitions Initiative Partnership Project (ETIPP). This includes helping them build better or new energy infrastructure that can generate clean, affordable, and locally sourced water power from their rivers and oceans.

"What I'm hoping is that we can actually lower rates and create long-term jobs with these projects that come out of the ETIPP program, and long sustainability for the people that live here," said Mayor Elijah Jackson of Ouzinkie, Alaska, who has been working to repair a 2019-installed hydropower plant to remove the Native village’s dependency on imported diesel.

Co-developed by NREL and Sandia National Laboratories, the first-of-its-kind, open-source Wave Energy Converter SIMulator WEC-Sim), which is a 2021 R&D 100 Award winner, has helped many organizations in the industry move wave energy converters into the commercial market. The National Aeronautics and Science Administration also used the tool to improve the safety of astronauts’ landing.

“Today, a lot of developers are going into the water to prove their technologies,” NREL’s Nathan Tom said. “Their design could produce a lot of power, but it can also cost millions of dollars just to get it in the ocean. What’s exciting about WEC-Sim is that it can help reduce these costs by optimizing designs at home, which could make wave energy development faster, cheaper, and, well, smarter.”