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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 325 records · Page 18
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
DOE OSTI2026

Pumped Storage Hydropower Operation & Maintenance Cost Estimation

The National Laboratory of the Rockies (NLR) develops and hosts a pumped storage hydropower (PSH) cost model that is the most detailed bottom-up PSH cost model available to the public. It is available both as a spreadsheet and an interactive web tool, enabling users with a variety of PSH interests to transparently characterize costs of alternative PSH sites and designs. The NLR PSH cost model was designed originally to consider only upfront capital costs only. This slide deck describes methodology to expand the cost model to include operations and maintenance (OM) costs. OM costs are characterized as five distinct components with unique sources and methods for cost estimation. By combining methods for each of these components into a cumulative OM cost estimate, these methods allow a more complete estimation of total OM costs that agrees with existing literature values. The methods are scalable and transparent, allowing them to be readily to applied to any prospective PSH facility for a representative preliminary OM cost estimate in advance of detailed site-specific engineering and other studies.

13 HYDRO ENERGY↗
DOE OSTI2020

DOE Investments in Environmentally Acceptable Lubricants for Hydropower Applications Fact Sheet

Environmentally acceptable lubricants (EALs) are defined as lubricants that meet U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) standards for “biodegradability, toxicity, and bioaccumulation potential that minimize their likely adverse consequences in the aquatic environment, compared to conventional lubricants.” Restrictions from state, local, and federal agencies, as well as a growing awareness of the environmental risks associated with petroleumbased lubricants, have shifted government and industry to seek out high-performing EALs. The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is working to reduce the environmental impacts of hydropower development and operation by investing in tools and methods to develop, demonstrate, and validate EAL materials.

water, environment, hydropower, EALs↗
DOE OSTI2020

Examining the Net Revenue and Downstream Flow Impact Trade-Offs for a Network of Cascading, Small-Scale Hydropower Facilities: Preprint

In this work, we used a price-taker model to investigate the trade-offs between net revenue and downstream flow impacts for a network of small, cascading hydro facilities. The network consisted of 36 facilities, each with a small amount of local storage (between 2 and 45 minutes). Generator sizes ranged between 0.5 and 1 MW, nominal, and the total capacity of the network was 33.5 MW. We used a multi-integer linear programing model to maximize the net revenue of the combined network subject to operating and environmental constraints. Net revenue optimizations relied on historic price data, and dry, typical, and wet years were studied to help ensure robustness. Energy and ancillary service sales were included in the net revenue calculations, and both unit commitment and dispatch simulations were performed. We found that limiting the downstream flows to ±50% of the river’s natural flows had a negligible impact on net revenues (<1% reduction), irrespective of hydrologic conditions, and even when downstream flows were limited to ±5%, net revenues were only impacted by 4%. These outcomes are significant because they demonstrate how an array of small-scale hydropower facilities can be operated to have minimal impact on natural stream flows—addressing a critical environmental concern.

downstream flow↗
DOE OSTI2021

NREL Helps Hydropower Projects Navigate Complex Regulatory Currents

Hydropower accounts for about 37% of U.S. renewable electricity generation. But before industry members can license and construct new projects or relicense existing projects, they must navigate complex approvals from federal, state, and tribal authorities. These regulations provide critical protections for water quality, species, cultural resources, and recreation, but they can also increase the costs, risks, and uncertainties to license or relicense projects.

HYDRO ENERGY↗
DOE OSTI2023

Data and Tools for Exploring New Pumped Storage Hydropower Deployment Opportunities

Pumped storage hydropower (PSH) is a flexible energy storage technology with the potential to facilitate variable renewable energy integration into the decarbonized electric grid of the future. NREL is developing new data and tools to help understand opportunities for new PSH deployment, including nationwide resource assessment data, a bottom-up component-level cost model, and a lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions calculator. These datasets lay the foundation for better-informed grid planning decisions about how PSH fits into a future portfolio of generation, transmission, and storage assets.

CEM↗
DOE OSTI2024

Pumped Storage Hydropower Potential and Opportunities

Pumped storage hydropower (PSH) is a flexible energy storage technology with the potential to improve grid reliability, resiliency, and stability in the electric grid of the future. NREL has developed a range of data and tools to help understand opportunities for new PSH deployment, including nationwide resource assessment data, a bottom-up component-level cost model, and a lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions calculator. These datasets can then be used to inform grid planning models, analysis, and decision making to understand the role PSH can play in the power sector.

cost↗
DOE OSTI2025

Monitoring and modeling hydrologic conditions in Ukraine for hydropower generation

Study region: The Dnieper and Dniester Rivers of Ukraine. Study focus: The ongoing conflict in Ukraine has caused disruptions to electricity generation, of which hydroelectric sources contribute approximately 9 % to the country’s needs. With the takeover of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant by enemy forces, the loss of the Kakhovka hydroelectric dam, and the future impacts of the conflict on electricity generation unclear, it may be valuable for the Ukrainian government to better understand how it could leverage hydroelectric power sources in the near future. Unfortunately, measurements of river discharge throughout Ukraine ceased data collection in the late 1980’s to early 1990’s. To address this data gap, we developed a protocol that combined satellite-based time-series measurements of river width at seven locations throughout Ukraine from 2013 to 2023 with reanalysis data, climate-model predictions, and hydrologic models to both provide a means of monitoring a proxy for near-real-time discharge and also predict near-term (i.e., 2023–2030) hydrologic patterns for the region. New hydrological insights for the region: We ran new algorithms on 144 WorldView-2 and WorldView-3 satellite images to map rivers and extract width, one of which was validated against river gauge data located along the same river but in a neighboring country. Hydrologic models using two climate scenarios found minimal change in annual discharge at all sites, but magnitude and timing of peak discharge showed a moderate trend. The results suggest that hydropower is underutilized in Ukraine.

13 HYDRO ENERGY↗
DOE OSTI2025

Forty-year hydropower generation reanalysis for Conterminous United States

First published in 2022, the RectifHyd dataset provides hydrologically consistent estimates of monthly net generation for approximately 1,500 hydropower plants in the United States, addressing a gap in industrial surveys that have collected monthly generation data from only ~10% of plants post-2003. Here we present RectifHydPlus—an extended and enhanced dataset that improves on both the proxy information and temporal downscaling methodology adopted in RectifHyd. In addition to providing updated estimates of historical monthly generation for 590 plants with >10 MW nameplate capacity from 1980 through 2019, RectifHydPlus adds a hydrological control dataset that isolates the influence of historical water availability on generation. The new hydrological control dataset is suited to applications seeking to represent the capabilities of the contemporary fleet subject to historical interannual variability in climate. RectifHydPlus also includes a forty-year, daily-resolution, spill-adjusted water release time series for each dam, allowing users to aggregate generation estimates to the desired temporal resolution.

Hydroelectricity↗
DOE OSTI2021

Secured Reserve Scheduling of Pumped-Storage Hydropower Plants in ISO Day-ahead Market

Due to the fast response ability and high ramping rates, pumped-storage hydropower (PSH) plants are playing an increasingly critical role in mitigating power generation fluctuations induced by the growing proliferation of renewable energy resources. However, because they are energy-limited resources, actual reserve deployment from PSHs would cause the deviation of state-of-charge (SOC) from the scheduled value, which, once accumulated over time, could induce potential violations on SOC limits and cause non-dispatchability of PSHs. In recognizing this potential issue, it can become important to securing the reserve schedule of PSHs and other energy limited resources preventively in the day-ahead market clearing. To ensure reserve dispatchability of PSHs despite SOC deviations, this paper proposes the reserve secure constraints, which are cast as a distributionally robust chance-constrained formulation by judiciously introducing random parameters to describe deployment ratios of scheduled regulation reserve from PSHs. Furthermore, these constraints are converted into tractable second-order cone constraints, and further approximated as linear constraints to be compatible with the current ISO day-ahead market clearing model. A modified IEEE 118-bus system with multiple PSHs is adopted to verify the proposed approach.

13 HYDRO ENERGY↗
DOE OSTI2023

Simulink Model of a New Energy EVG-005 5kW Hydropower Turbine

Simulink model for a New Energy 5kW hydropower turbine. ADCP data ("ds_streamwise_7_13.nc") and DC voltage, DC current, and rotor rotation observed from the New Energy EVG-005 Current Energy Converter (CEC) ("electrical_7_13_10ohms.nc") were collected at the Tanana River Test Site (TRTS) near Nenana Alaska. - Data was collected on July 13th, 2023 with a constant 10 ohms resistance applied with a DC load bank. - Simulink model is meant to resemble the electrical setup at the TRTS. - Model is initialized by running the "NewEnergy_2023_10hz.m" Matlab script. Then the Simulink model ("New_Energy_Model_PMSM.slx") can be run. - Results are processed with the "NewEnergy_2023_processing.m" Matlab code. The Matlab results are also saved in the "New_Energy_7_13_model_validation_results.mat" Matlab file. This can be directly loaded into the Matlab Workspace using the "Load()" command. - The timetable variables "electrical_model_downsampled" is the model results and the "electrical_limited" is the experimental data from the TRTS.

16 TIDAL AND WAVE POWER↗
DOE OSTI2022

Simulink Modeling and Dynamic Study of Fixed-Speed, Variable-Speed, and Ternary Pumped Storage Hydropower

Pumped Storage Hydropower (PSH) is one of the most popular energy storage technologies in the world. It uses an upper reservoir to store water which can be later used during high-demand. In the United States, most of the energy storage capability actually corresponds to PSH. Moreover, PSH also brings multiple benefits to grid operation. This report presents the Simulink models of three common PSH technologies: Fixed-Speed (FS), Variable-Speed (VS), and Ternary (T)-PSH. These models are available to the general public on this GitHub repository, which contains the MATLAB model initialization files, the Simulink model files, and supplementary MATLAB code used to obtain the figures in this work. For each PSH model, an introductory description of the model components and other relevant functionalities are provided. For further information regarding the models and the initialization parameters, the reader is referred to the shared files in the repository. This report also presents the dynamic behavior of each model. The response of such models to a load event is analyzed and matched with each model's features. A custom IEEE 39 bus case is employed for the FS and T-PSH simulations, while the VS-PSH is simulated on a simplified three-bus test system due to the computational complexity of the model. For the T-PSH, the steady-state and the switching between several operating modes are also studied in this work.

13 HYDRO ENERGY↗
DOE OSTI2022

Pumped Storage Hydropower Augmented with Pressurized Air: The Ground-Level Integrated Diverse Energy Storage (GLIDES) System — GLIDES System Configurations and Use Cases

Energy storage is essential for cost-effective integration of variable renewable energy sources to support a low-carbon grid. It is also a key enabler of a modern grid infrastructure for demand management. However, several main challenges remain for different kind of energy storage technologies in grid scale deployment. Currently, the largest source of utility-scale storage and long-duration storage in the US is pumped storage hydropower (PSH). Prospect of growth in conventional PSH faces challenges that have limited its deployment over the last three decades, including high capital costs and long deployment timelines. Batteries have high energy densities and are the primary technology of choice for small-scale energy storage. Compressed air energy storage (CAES) is another large-scale energy storage technology, but there are few plants deployed worldwide. They suffer from their low round trip efficiency (RTE) due to the use of high-pressure air compressors. To address some of the challenges associated with these various storage technologies, the Ground-Level Integrated Diverse Energy Storage (GLIDES) is a modular PSH technology that was invented in 2015 at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. It utilizes gas compression to store electric energy. GLIDES stores energy by compressing gas using a liquid piston in high-pressure vessels. In doing so the vessels act as the upper reservoir in conventional PSH. Initially, the vessels are filled with gas to a prescribed pressure. To store energy, GLIDES uses a hydraulic piston pump to pump water into the pressurized vessels. As the water volume increases inside the vessels, water acts as a hydraulic piston compressing the gas on top of it. This process can be thought of as pumping water from the lower reservoir to the higher reservoir in PSH, increasing the water head. To dispatch the stored energy, the high-head water in the vessel is discharge through a high head Pelton hydraulic turbine that is connected to an electric generator. Employing high-pressure vessels enables GLIDES to reach water heads ~10-80 times higher than conventional PSH, achieving ~40 times higher energy densities, and overcomes the geographic limitation of conventional PSH. Although its energy density is much lower than that of batteries, GLIDES holds the potential advantages of having long service life, ease of system integration and being less hazardous over batteries. GLIDES prospective scalability could make it suitable for wide range of applications from behind the meter storage in buildings to grid-scale storage. It also makes it suitable for installations in densely populated urban areas where energy storage is most needed and real estate is limited. Over the last 5 years, work has focused on increasing GLIDES’ energy density, decreasing its initial capital cost of the system, and increasing its revenue potential. Several designs were developed and prototyped to verify and demonstrate the improvement in energy density. The latest prototype achieved energy density of 1.21 kWh/m 3 . Our analysis showed that it could achieve up to 1.7 kWh/m 3 with a mixture of air and carbon dioxide as the gas being compressed.

13 HYDRO ENERGY↗
DOE OSTI2024

Small Hydropower Interconnection Best Practices Guidelines and Templates

The process for development of a hydropower project can be a convoluted and lengthy process involving numerous federal, state, and local agencies and encompass a plethora of stakeholders that other renewable project development processes may not have to consider. Additionally, the process may vary depending on who the owner/operator is, such as private, nonutility companies; private utility companies; municipalities; electric cooperatives; private citizens; and state and federal government agencies.

13 HYDRO ENERGY↗
DOE OSTI2024

Opportunities for Pumped Storage Hydropower under the Inflation Reduction Act [Slides]

The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) creates significant incentives for clean energy technologies including pumped storage hydropower (PSH). The investment tax credit (ITC) is expected to sunset in 2033 (or later). This decade-long window of opportunity can accommodate the lead times typically necessary for developing PSH. The ITC for PSH likely ranges from 6%-50%. Portions of the ITC are spatially dependent. 22 states have the potential for deployment of PSH at a feasible site with the maximum ITC of 50%, based on currently defined areas under the energy community tax credit bonus. Regions including the central Rockies, Appalachia and the California-Nevada border have especially high combined potential for site feasibility and ITC.

13 HYDRO ENERGY↗
DOE OSTI2025

HydroForecast Long-term: Improving hydropower’s resilience to climate change through accurate climate-scale

With hydrologic patterns and water availability across the globe shifting due to climate change, advancements in hydrologic prediction systems can help significantly reduce the uncertainties that utilities and water supply entities have in their decision making. Understanding and estimating hydrology at the climate scale is critical for managing water resources under changing climate scenarios. This project focuses on integrating state-of-the-art neural network modeling with downscaled climate projections to deliver the reliable water supply projections decades into the future to meet an urgent need from hydropower operators and water utilities. In this Phase 1 DOE SBIR proposal, we developed and validated a theory-guided neural network model, HydroForecast Long-term, for climate-scale hydrology and implemented the model within existing HydroForecast infrastructure. HydroForecast Long-term combines the most accurate streamflow modeling system with a flexible and scalable data architecture to generate water supply projections out to the year 2100. This report illustrates that we have achieved our four objectives: 1) create a prototype of HydroForecast Long-term, building the neural network prediction model, 2) build an automated data input pipeline that processes large amounts of data from the latest global temperature and precipitation climate models; 3) benchmark the accuracy of the hydrologic model over the recent two decades over a large set of diverse basins, and 4) create a set of output visuals and summary metrics informed by customer feedback that connect the data to critical decision points. This work empowers water users to make data-informed decisions supporting a resilient, renewable-powered grid and water system. The results advance the Department of Energy’s mission by addressing critical gaps in water supply planning under climate change.

13 HYDRO ENERGY↗
DOE OSTI2025

Addressing Critical Challenges of Coal Mines for Underground Pumped Storage Hydropower Using Numerical Calculations

Using existing coal mines to build underground pumped storage hydropower (UPSH) power plants could help reduce the costs associated with starting a new PSH operation. This innovative approach can leverage the existing infrastructure of coal mine facilities available in many regions of the United States. However, technical challenges associated with water quality, mineral chemistry and integrity of subsurface topologies have thus far prevented any of these facilities from going online. Rye Development is investigating the feasibility of UPSH at existing coal mine facilities. In this project, Rye Development received the technical assistance from Oak Ridge National Laboratory to investigate the impacts of minerals, metal particles, and chemical substances in water flow on hydraulic equipment and assess the overall structural integrity of hydraulic equipment in former coal mines.

13 HYDRO ENERGY↗