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Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.

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At least 217 records · Page 12
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
DOE OSTI2024

Towards Non-Intrusive Real-Time Monitoring of Behind the Meter Residential Distributed Energy Resources

The growing adoption of residential distributed energy resources (DERs) introduces more uncertain variability in power grid operation. More importantly, the residential DERs operate behind customers’ energy meters, and therefore, the utility cannot “directly” monitor them. Prior approaches to enable visibility into behind-the-meter (BTM) DERs either depend on estimations or require intrusive instrumentation on the customer side. To address the critical need for direct real-time monitoring of BTM DERs, in this paper, we propose a novel approach for utility-side direct real-time monitoring of residential BTM DERs. We utilize high-frequency (> 10kHz) conducted electromagnetic interference (EMI) from residential DERs’ grid-tied inverters to monitor their power generation. We discuss the working principle of our approach and present supporting results using three of-the-shelf grid-tied inverters.

14 SOLAR ENERGY↗
DOE OSTI2024

Leveraging PHIL for Inverter Functionality Requirement Evaluation to Ensure a Reliable Grid

This presentation showcases NREL's ongoing research on advanced Multi-point Power Hardware-in-the-Loop (PHIL) systems, enabling comprehensive evaluation of interoperability, stability, and wide-area stability in complex power grids. Key features include high-power PHIL capabilities, seamless PHIL Interfaces for effortless Grid-Following (GFL) and Grid-Forming (GFM) mode switching, and advanced multi-domain PHIL/Controller Hardware-in-the-Loop (CHIL) capabilities for evaluating diverse technology mixes, facilitating rigorous testing and validation of emerging power systems for reliable integration, enhanced resilience, and optimal performance.

lab capabilities↗
DOE OSTI2026

Dynamic Transmission Line Switching Amid Wildfire-Prone Weather Under Decision-Dependent Uncertainty

During dry and windy seasons, environmental conditions significantly increase the risk of wildfires, exposing power grids to disruptions caused by transmission line failures. Wildfire propagation exacerbates grid vulnerability, potentially leading to prolonged power outages. To address this challenge, we propose a multistage optimization model that dynamically adjusts transmission grid topology in response to wildfire propagation, aiming to develop an optimal response policy. By accounting for decision-dependent uncertainty, where line survival probabilities depend on usage, we employ distributionally robust optimization to model uncertainty in line survival distributions. We adapt the stochastic nested decomposition algorithm and derive a deterministic upper bound for its finite convergence. To enhance computational efficiency, we exploit the Lagrangian dual problem structure for a faster generation of Lagrangian cuts. Using realistic data from the California transmission grid, we demonstrate the superior performance of dynamic response policies against two-stage alternatives through a comprehensive case study. In addition, after solving the multistage formulation, we construct easy-to-implement policies that significantly reduce computational burden while maintaining good performance in real-time deployment. History: Accepted by Russell Bent, Area Editor for Network Optimization: Algorithms and Applications. Funding: This work was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Electricity [Grant DE-AC02-05CH11231]. The work of R. Jiang was supported in part by the U.S. National Science Foundation, Division of Electrical, Communications and Cyber Systems [Grant ECCS-1845980] and the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research [Grant FA9550-23-1-0323]. Supplemental Material: The software that supports the findings of this study is available within the paper and its Supplemental Information ( https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/suppl/10.1287/ijoc.2025.1210 ) as well as from the IJOC GitHub software repository ( https://github.com/INFORMSJoC/2025.1210 ). The complete IJOC Software and Data Repository is available at https://informsjoc.github.io/ .

Estrada-Garcia, Juan-Alberto↗
DOE OSTI2026

Integrating Data Centers and Grid Technologies at Scale

This presentation focuses on the challenge of integrating AI-driven data centers with the power grid at scale. It examines the AI data center capacity challenge and the role of new Medium Voltage Direct Current (MVDC) and other grid-enhancing technologies in enabling efficient and reliable power delivery. The session will highlight the National Laboratory of the Rockies' ARIES capabilities and planning tools, along with collaborative examples involving Verrus, Compass, and Schneider through the Agora test bed for grid-friendly data center evaluations, and ON. Energy for UPS evaluation. It will showcase the NLR Stable Grid Platform for studying oscillations caused by large-scale data centers, along with planning tools to assess grid security and reliability. Additionally, the presentation covers reconductoring strategies to increase grid capacity and explores innovative data center architectures, including the Advanced DC Architectures with Power-electronic Transformers (ADAPT) platform, which enables testing of complete DC architectures for data centers.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗
DOE OSTI2025

Evaluating grid stress and reliability in future electricity grids across a range of demand, generation mix, and weather trends

The reliability of power grids in the future will depend on how system planners account for the integration of new technologies, extreme weather events, and uncertainties in demand growth from increased electrification and data centers. This study introduces an open-source, multisectoral, multiscale modeling framework that projects grid stress and reliability trends between 2020 and 2055 in the Western Interconnection of the United States. The framework integrates global to national energy-water-land dynamics with power plant siting and hourly grid operations modeling. We analyze future wholesale electricity price shocks and unserved energy events across eight scenarios spanning a range of population growth and economic change, generation mixes, and weather conditions. Our results show future grids with high percentage of non-renewable generation and strong economic growth are characterized by higher reliability and lower wholesale electricity prices than lower growth scenarios because of larger reliance on dispatchable generators and lower fossil fuel extraction costs. Scenarios with high percentage of renewable resources have lower median but more volatile wholesale electricity prices as well as more frequent and severe unserved energy events compared to scenarios relying more on dispatchable generators. These events occur because higher proportion of solar and wind energy causes net demand curves to deepen during midday (duck curves get progressively severe), exacerbating the challenge of meeting demand during summer evening peaks. This study suggests that robust and co-optimized transmission and energy storage planning could help maintain low wholesale electricity prices and high reliability levels in future electricity grids across uncertainties in generation mixes.

Electric grid reliability↗
DOE OSTI2025

Enabling Technology for Energy Sustainability: Power Electronic Converter Control for Renewables

To ensure high penetration of renewable energy sources into power grids, their interfacing inverters need to be designed to provide grid support functions. Important grid support functions include frequency and voltage support. To this end, the research community has recently invested heavily on grid-forming control pilot projects. Grid forming control aims to replace traditional grid following control, which is based on phase-locked loop and can achieve decoupled real and reactive power control. Here, in this article, we review the state-of-the-art grid following and forming technology and point out some deficiencies in dynamic performance in the widely adopted grid-forming control design. We also examine how to ensure that the vector control capable of decoupled real and reactive power regulation can also be achieved in the grid forming design. This type of design has been prototyped and shown great potential to enable retrofitting of large amounts of grid-following controllers through purely software algorithm update. The technology ensures reliable operation of power grids with high penetration of IBRs, thereby further reducing fossil fueled energy sources and cut down carbon emission.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗
DOE OSTI2026

Fast, Controllable, and Modular Solid-State Circuit Breaker Design for Battery Management Systems

Electric power grid is experiencing a growing number of distributed and inertia-free generation resources. To facilitate the growing generation and load demands, and ensure stable operation, energy storage systems, especially behind-themeter-storage (BTMS), have emerged as a potential candidate. BTMS plays a vital role in the grid storage sector and supports high power charging for EVs. However, the potential of thermal runaway and associated safety concerns in the batteries can hamper their widespread adoption. In this work, we provide a solution for a fast and controllable discharge of a cell that was identified as a stressful/faulty, in the battery pack, and fast circuit breaking leveraging the Solid-State Circuit Breaker (SSCB) technology which provides active control over the cell connection as opposed to conventional passive solutions. Testing on the simulation platform successfully validated the concept, demonstrating its efficacy. Controlled discharge testing with 20Ah LiFePO4 Lithium Iron Phosphate (LFP) cells from 1C-10C current rate on the hardware prototype corroborated simulation results, demonstrating design feasibility and providing essential data for its performance and thermal characteristics, while also revealing limitations that inform areas for further optimization.

33 ADVANCED PROPULSION SYSTEMS↗
DOE OSTI2026

Wind Power as a Virtual Synchronous Generator (WindVSG)

This project investigated the theory, implemented it in hardware, and validated the Wind as a Virtual Isochronous Generator (WindVSG) concept by combining the advantages of modern dynamic inverter technologies with static, dynamic, and transient electromechanical properties of synchronous machines. During this project we demonstrated how to control the inverters of wind turbine generators (wind alone or in parallel with other GFM sources, such battery energy storage) so that wind power behaves like a synchronous machine-based power plant with a conventional prime mover. For this purpose, testing was conducted at NLR ARIES facility with real 2.5 MW wind-turbine generator operating in GFM mode under dynamic and transient conditions. The team also developed models and conducted simulations for GFM wind power to evaluate stability impacts of GFM operation on power grid. This report describes efforts by the NLR team working in collaboration GE Vernova during 3-year project.

17 WIND ENERGY↗
NASA NTRS2001

Distributed Accounting on the Grid

By the late 1990s, the Internet was adequately equipped to move vast amounts of data between HPC (High Performance Computing) systems, and efforts were initiated to link together the national infrastructure of high performance computational and data storage resources together into a general computational utility 'grid', analogous to the national electrical power grid infrastructure. The purpose of the Computational grid is to provide dependable, consistent, pervasive, and inexpensive access to computational resources for the computing community in the form of a computing utility. This paper presents a fully distributed view of Grid usage accounting and a methodology for allocating Grid computational resources for use on a Grid computing system.

Thigpen, William↗
NASA NTRS2003

Master Software Requirements Specification

A basic function of a computational grid such as the NASA Information Power Grid (IPG) is to allow users to execute applications on remote computer systems. The Globus Resource Allocation Manager (GRAM) provides this functionality in the IPG and many other grids at this time. While the functionality provided by GRAM clients is adequate, GRAM does not support useful features such as staging several sets of files, running more than one executable in a single job submission, and maintaining historical information about execution operations. This specification is intended to provide the environmental and software functional requirements for the IPG Job Manager V2.0 being developed by AMTI for NASA.

Hu, Chaumin↗
DOE OSTI2024

Cybersecurity Considerations and Research Pathways for Grid-Interactive Efficient Buildings

Federal facilities serve critical missions and functions that require safe, reliable, and efficient operations. Digitization of several facility operations has increased the cost-effectiveness of energy usage and optimization of energy system performance. As the building controls landscape shifts to become more connected and smarter, building operators now face unique opportunities and challenges to adopt smart enabled devices that can lower energy usage while also optimizing building system performance. The grid-interactive efficient buildings (GEB) initiative aims to make buildings cleaner and more flexible through these smart devices. Smart enabled devices allow greater connectivity and control through remote operations and provide crucial data for analytics and increased efficiency. GEBs enable demand flexibility that has the potential to reduce electrical costs and transform the grid edge where buildings connect to power grids. This operation of interconnected systems, if not designed with cybersecurity practices, causes security gaps and introduces potential attack paths by adversarial and non-adversarial entities leading to disruption of operations.

building controls↗
NASA NTRS2009

Development and Testing of a Prototype Grid-Tied Photovoltaic Power System

The NASA Glenn Research Center (GRC) has developed and tested a prototype 2 kW DC grid-tied photovoltaic (PV) power system at the Center. The PV system has generated in excess of 6700 kWh since operation commenced in July 2006. The PV system is providing power to the GRC grid for use by all. Operation of the prototype PV system has been completely trouble free. A grid-tied PV power system is connected directly to the utility distribution grid. Facility power can be obtained from the utility system as normal. The PV system is synchronized with the utility system to provide power for the facility, and excess power is provided to the utility. The project transfers space technology to terrestrial use via nontraditional partners. GRC personnel glean valuable experience with PV power systems that are directly applicable to various space power systems, and provide valuable space program test data. PV power systems help to reduce harmful emissions and reduce the Nation s dependence on fossil fuels. Power generated by the PV system reduces the GRC utility demand, and the surplus power aids the community. Present global energy concerns reinforce the need for the development of alternative energy systems. Modern PV panels are readily available, reliable, efficient, and economical with a life expectancy of at least 25 years. Modern electronics has been the enabling technology behind grid-tied power systems, making them safe, reliable, efficient, and economical with a life expectancy of at least 25 years. Based upon the success of the prototype PV system, additional PV power system expansion at GRC is under consideration. The prototype grid-tied PV power system was successfully designed and developed which served to validate the basic principles described, and the theoretical work that was performed. The report concludes that grid-tied photovoltaic power systems are reliable, maintenance free, long life power systems, and are of significant value to NASA and the community.

Eichenberg, Dennis J.↗
NASA NTRS2009

Development and Testing of the Glenn Research Center Visitor's Center Grid-Tied Photovoltaic Power System

The NASA Glenn Research Center (GRC) has developed, installed, and tested a 12 kW DC grid-tied photovoltaic (PV) power system at the GRC Visitor s Center. This system utilizes a unique ballast type roof mount for installing the photovoltaic panels on the roof of the Visitor s Center with no alterations or penetrations to the roof. The PV system has generated in excess of 15000 kWh since operation commenced in August 2008. The PV system is providing power to the GRC grid for use by all. Operation of the GRC Visitor s Center PV system has been completely trouble free. A grid-tied PV power system is connected directly to the utility distribution grid. Facility power can be obtained from the utility system as normal. The PV system is synchronized with the utility system to provide power for the facility, and excess power is provided to the utility. The project transfers space technology to terrestrial use via nontraditional partners. GRC personnel glean valuable experience with PV power systems that are directly applicable to various space power systems, and provides valuable space program test data. PV power systems help to reduce harmful emissions and reduce the Nation s dependence on fossil fuels. Power generated by the PV system reduces the GRC utility demand, and the surplus power aids the community. Present global energy concerns reinforce the need for the development of alternative energy systems. Modern PV panels are readily available, reliable, efficient, and economical with a life expectancy of at least 25 years. Modern electronics has been the enabling technology behind grid-tied power systems, making them safe, reliable, efficient, and economical with a life expectancy of at least 25 years. Based upon the success of the GRC Visitor s Center PV system, additional PV power system expansion at GRC is under consideration. The GRC Visitor s Center grid-tied PV power system was successfully designed and developed which served to validate the basic principles described, and the theoretical work that was performed. The report concludes that grid-tied photovoltaic power systems are reliable, maintenance free, long life power systems, and are of significant value to NASA and the community.

Eichenberg, Dennis J.↗
DOE OSTI2024

Digital Twin + AI: Control Room of the Future

A digital twin enhances power grid control room operations by providing real-time monitoring, predictive insights, simulation capabilities, remote control, training opportunities, data integration, and decision support. This technology empowers control room operators to effectively manage the grid, optimize performance, and ensure reliable and efficient energy distribution.

control room of the future↗
DOE OSTI2024

Performance Evaluation of Multi-Vendor Grid-Forming Inverters for Grid-Connected Operation Through Hardware Experimentation

This paper presents the functional performance evaluation tests of multiple (three) commercial grid-forming (GFM) inverters when they operate in parallel with the grid through hardware experiments. The goal of these tests is to explore and benchmark the GFM inverters' functionalities and dynamic response when they are operated in parallel with power grids. Both steady-state (changing the inverter's frequency and voltage droop) and transient (adding step changes to grid's frequency/voltage) tests are performed for each GFM inverter with the same testing circuit and testing protocol. The key findings are summarized as follows: 1) The GFM inverters can be dispatched through frequency and voltage droop intercepts to output the target power; and 1) the GFM inverters automatically respond to system frequency and voltage events to output the needed power; 3) all the GFM inviters shows stability issues when absorbing reactive power from the grid.

frequency droop↗
DOE OSTI2024

Grid-Interactive Efficient Buildings Support Federal Facility Decarbonization

The Federal Energy Management Program (FEMP) plays a key role in helping agencies understand and meet energy-related goals, including those surrounding smart buildings technologies and grid-interactive efficient buildings (GEBs), which can support decarbonization. GEB enables demand flexibility that has the potential to reduce electrical infrastructure costs and transform the grid edge, where buildings connect to the power grid.

decarbonization↗
DOE OSTI2025

Data efficiency assessment of generative adversarial networks in energy applications

This study investigates the data requirements of generative artificial intelligence (AI), particularly generative adversarial networks (GANs), for reliable data augmentation in energy applications. Generative AI, though seen as a solution to data limitations, requires substantial data to learn meaningful distributions—a challenge often overlooked. This study addresses the challenge through synthetic data generation for critical heat flux (CHF) and power grid demand, focusing on renewable and nuclear energy. Two variants of GAN employed are conditional GAN (cGAN) and Wasserstein GAN (wGAN). Our findings include the strong dependency of GAN on data size, with performance declining on smaller datasets and varying performance when generalizing to unseen experiments. Mass flux and heated length significantly influence CHF predictions. wGAN is more robust to feature exclusion, making it suitable for constrained synthetic data generation. In energy demand forecasting, wGAN performed well for solar, wind, and load predictions. Longer lookback hours and larger datasets improved predictions, especially for load power. Seasonal variations posed challenges, with wGAN achieving a relatively high error of Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE) of 0.32 for load power prediction, compared to RMSE of 0.07 under same-season conditions. Feature exclusions impacted cGAN the most, while wGAN showed greater robustness. This study concludes that, while generative AI is effective for data augmentation, it requires substantial data and careful training to generate realistic synthetic data and generalize to new experiments in engineering applications.

22 - GENERAL STUDIES OF NUCLEAR REACTORS↗