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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 37 records · Page 2
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
DOE OSTI2025

Equity-driven Planning of Distributed Solar PV using Optimal Transport

Typically, distribution system planning processes do not explicitly incorporate energy equity considerations, such as identifying consumers most affected by energy costs and determining how investments in the distribution system can address existing energy burden imbalances. This paper proposes a novel optimal transport (OT)-based method to improve the energy burden distribution of consumers. The approach involves the strategic siting and sizing of solar PV in order to assist customers with high energy burden and improve the overall energy burden distribution of the community. The desired energy burden distribution is defined using the equal distribution equivalent (EDE) concept. The OT-based method is then used to estimate the distributed solar PV capacity to be installed at various locations and the tariffs to be adjusted, all while improving the energy burden distribution and providing valuable insights into distributed generation (DG) planning. The results on IEEE 37 bus test system demonstrate how DG planning, considering EDE and OT, can help reduce the energy burden of low-income consumers. Additionally, the approach also reveals optimal tariff adjustments needed to ensure revenue neutrality for distribution utilities.

Optimal transport, equal distribution equivalent, ↗
DOE OSTI2024

Distributional Equity in the Employment and Wage Impacts of Energy Transitions

We use restricted-access, geocoded data on the near-universe of workers in 23 US states to quantify the impact of wind energy development on local earnings and employment, by race, ethnicity, sex, and educational attainment. We find significant impacts that persist for several years beyond the project construction phase. Our estimates are larger than those from previous studies but still small relative to typical economic multipliers for fiscal spending or investment in other industries. We find the largest percentage increases for black workers and workers who either do not have a high school diploma or who have a college degree. We also find the economic gains for men to be much larger than those for women. Finally, we find estimates from data aggregated to the county level to be significantly lower than our worker-level estimates. We suggest a number of areas for further study building off the justice implications of our findings.

employment↗
DOE OSTI2024

Embedding Equity into Electric Vehicle Charging Station Design

Once a site location is selected for the installation of an electric vehicle (EV) charging station, the next step is to plan and design the specific station. Local and state governments can require and/ or incentivize accessible and safe design elements, so the station is constructed in an equitable manner.

ADVANCED PROPULSION SYSTEMS,ENERGY PLANNING, POLIC↗
DOE OSTI2024

Technology progress and clean vehicle policies on fleet turnover and equity: insights from household vehicle fleet micro-simulations with $\text{ATLAS}$

This paper documents the design and application of ATLAS (Automobile and Technology Lifecycle-Based ASsignment), a comprehensive household vehicle transaction and technology adoption micro-simulator in the San Francisco Bay Area. ATLAS evolves the fleet mix of individual households by simulating the vehicle transaction and choice decisions in response to co-evolving demographics, land use, and vehicle technology simulations. While most existing literature has focused on the aggregate clean vehicle uptake, this paper differentiates distributional effects and decomposes the underlying mechanisms across heterogeneous sub-populations of households. Using scenarios and sensitivity simulations that vary vehicle technology and policy assumptions, we find that Zero Emission Vehicles (ZEVs) penetrate into higher income groups at a faster rate than into lower income groups, which is intuitive and aligns with expectations. Interestingly, the relative income disparity in ZEV ownership shrinks over time across all scenarios, with a ZEV mandate coupled with declining battery cost leading to the greatest reduction in disparity of ZEV ownership by 2050. Federal, state, and local financial incentives influence the redistribution of ZEV uptake across income groups and contribute to narrowing income disparity. Vehicle transaction frequency and new versus used market dynamics are found to be important factors contributing to the income disparity.

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗
DOE OSTI2024

The health, climate, and equity benefits of freight truck electrification in the United States

Abstract Long-haul freight shipment in the United States relies on diesel trucks and constitutes ∼3% of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions and a significant share of local air pollution. Here, we compare the climate and air pollution-related health damages from electric versus diesel long-haul truck fleets. We use truck commodity flows to estimate tailpipe emissions from diesel trucks and regional grid emissions intensities to estimate charging emissions from electric trucks under various grid scenarios. We use a reduced complexity air quality model combined with valuation of air pollution-related premature deaths (using two hazard ratios (HRs)) and quantify the distributional health impacts in different scenarios. We find that annual health and climate costs of the current diesel fleet are $195–$249/capita compared to $174–$205/capita for a new diesel fleet, and $156–$177/capita for an electric fleet, depending on the HR. We find that freight electrification could avoid $6.2–8.5 billion in health and climate damages annually when compared to a fleet of new diesel vehicles (with even higher benefits when compared to the current diesel fleet). However, the Midwest and parts of the Gulf Coast would experience an increase in health damages due to vehicles charging using electricity from coal power plants. If old coal power plants (operating in 1980 or earlier) are replaced with zero-emission generation, electrification of all U.S. freight would result in $32.3–39.2 billion in avoided damages annually and health benefits throughout the U.S. Electrifying transport of consumer manufacturing goods (including electronics, transport equipment, and precision instruments) and food, beverage, and tobacco products would provide the largest absolute health and climate benefits, whereas mixed freight and manufacturing goods would result in the largest benefits per tonne-km. We find small variations in health damages across race and income. These results will help policymakers prioritize electrification and charging investment strategies for the freight transportation sub-sector.

Hennessy, Eleanor M. (ORCID:0000000294715765)↗
DOE OSTI2024

Distributed Energy Resources as an Equity Asset: Lessons Learned from Deployments in Disadvantaged Communities

For an Energy System to be truly equitable, it should provide affordable and reliable energy services to disadvantaged and underserved populations. Disadvantaged communities often face a combination of economic, social, health, and environmental burdens and may be geographically isolated (e.g., rural communities), which systematically limits their opportunity to fully participate in aspects of economic, social, and civic life.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗
DOE OSTI2025

Developing Partnership between San Jose State University and DOE Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to Enhance Climate Research Equity and Inclusion

One of the key objectives of this project was to develop partnership between San Jose State University (SJSU) and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), a US Department of Energy (DOE) funded national laboratory. Both institutions are closely located within the San Francisco Bay Area in California and their researchers share overlapping research interests and expertise related to Earth system sciences. By leveraging their connections with LLNL, faculty and students from SJSU gained exposure to state-of-the-art observations and simulations related to Earth system sciences, including but not limited to the usage of the facility data provided by the DOE Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) program and data analysis techniques for interpreting and analyzing the DOE Energy Exascale Earth System Model (E3SM) simulations.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2025

Energy Program Innovation Cluster for Equity and Health in Grid-Interactive Efficient Buildings (Final Technical Report)

The EPIC Buildings program was created to target Central New York’s (CNY) Energy Program Innovation Cluster, focused on developing energy hardware innovations for next-generation grid-interactive efficient buildings (GEB). The goals of the program were to establish and grow a sustainable regional innovation cluster for GEB in CNY and support the ambitious transition to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050.

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗
DOE OSTI2024

Integration of equitable resilience metrics into climate-informed electric utility planning processes: phase one

Working together, Sandia National Laboratories, Southern California Edison (SCE) - an Investor-Owned Utility (IOU) - and the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) are studying how electric utilities can use equity and resilience metrics to help inform the prioritization and sequencing of resilience-driven infrastructure investments. To this end, this project evaluated “Social Burden,” an equitable resilience metric which measures the potential impact of disruptions in access to non-electric critical services on people and estimates community resilience to these disruptions. The Social Burden was expanded to incorporate SCE’s existing equity metric and applied to evaluate the potential impacts from a range of climate-informed hypothetical outage scenarios developed under SCE’s 2022 Climate Adaptation Vulnerability Assessment. One baseline (“blue-sky”) state and eight different outage scenarios were evaluated to measure the potential impacts of the outages on non-electric infrastructure, critical services, and people. Key findings include: 1) the Social Burden framework is flexible enough to adapt to and build upon existing utility equity and/or resilience metrics, 2) Social Burden results highlight the high degree of non-electric service redundancy within the SCE service area with most (6/8) hypothetical outage scenarios predicted to increase people’s Social Burden by less than 10%; however, 3) access to critical services and people’s ability to obtain them is unequal and spatially clustered, meaning that there are some hypothetical outage scenarios (2/8) that will exert a higher toll on communities directly experiencing the outage as well as some nearby communities with pre-existing vulnerabilities. The report concludes with recommendations for potential use cases of the expanded Social Burden metric and identifies priority follow-on work. Potential use cases may include incorporating equity into IOU’s prioritization of climate resilience investments. Additionally, Social Burden analysis may provide additional data and insights to augment grid planning, potentially by identifying additional needs and/or prioritizing previously identified needs.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗
DOE OSTI2025

A Framework for Assessing Economic and Environmental Trade-offs of Internalized Emission Costs in ERCOT Grid Planning

The power grid is on the cusp of a massive transition driven by three major areas: 1) the growth in demand for electricity, 2) efforts to decarbonize the United States economy, and 3) a desire to mitigate social disparities from the impact of electricity generation on local populations. However, most studies of the electricity sector do not include equity impacts in their models. This study seeks to do so by developing a comprehensive and generalizable model tailored to the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) grid, designed to incorporate the equity impacts of electricity generation in a decarbonized and resilient framework. To integrate equity into our research, we incorporate environmental externalities into our capacity expansion model of ERCOT. Specifically, we factor in intermediate-level local marginal damages of precursor pollutants (NH3, NOx, primary PM2.5, SO2, and VOC) and global pollutant CO2 into the cost of generating electricity. We do this by taking into account county population, county ambient pollution concentration, and generator emission rates. Leveraging open-source modeling tools, such as PowerGenome, pyGRETA, and GenX we construct a county-level model to account for these costs. We integrate these marginal damages into the variable operations and maintenance costs of generators, for both existing and potential future builds. This study’s findings suggest that the value of a dynamic social cost of carbon (SSC) will cover criteria pollutant marginal damages within the ERCOT grid and solar and wind is expected to increase out to 2035. Key metrics evaluated within this research include fuel mix distribution across technologies, transmission and grid infrastructure costs, CO2 emissions, local pollutants marginal damages, and the variation in generation capacity built by the model. These results and framework can be used to support grid decisions that explicitly include distributional and procedural equity within a decarbonized and sustainable grid framework.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗
DOE OSTI2024

Advancing equitable value chains for the global hydrogen economy

Hydrogen is a rapidly growing focus for countries seeking to develop green industries, but there are many questions about how the nascent global hydrogen economy will develop, and what this implies for equitable sharing of benefits and burdens between nations. In this perspective we summarize emerging trends in national hydrogen strategies and develop recommendations for researchers and policymakers to center equity in hydrogen development. This will require integrating innovation and development perspectives on international technology transfer, developing more detailed representation of hydrogen trade in systems models, building equity considerations into national and international planning processes, and establishing robust technology transfer efforts. In conclusion, policymakers will also need to grapple with the difficulties of verifying life cycle emissions of hydrogen if hydrogen trade emerges as a significant trend, potentially requiring new methods of emissions accounting and trade reforms that prioritize international equity.

08 HYDROGEN↗
DOE OSTI2026

Electric Utility Distribution Costs: Scoping Study on Trends, Drivers, and Possible Response Strategies [Slides]

This scoping study synthesizes information that will help stakeholders understand the scope, scale, and drivers of recent increases in investor-owned utility (IOU) expenditures on local distribution power grids, while providing regulators and other decision-makers with potential strategies to keep electricity bills down. The study includes five distinct components. Drawing first on data from FERC Form 1, it summarizes key trends in past and recent IOU distribution costs. Next, through a review of a sample of distribution-system plans, it characterizes material drivers of planned distribution expenditures. Ultimately, regulators must approve cost recovery for IOU expenditures, including those for the distribution system. The study therefore also: examines trends in utility requests and regulatory approvals related to changes in retail rates and return on equity; identifies areas where utility shareholder and customer incentives may be misaligned; and develops a menu of options that state regulators might consider to optimize distribution system expenditures. Some of the key findings include: - IOU distribution spending at a national level has grown by 6%/yr since 2014 in real dollar terms, 4x faster than in the prior 20 years and consisting mostly of capital (not operating) expenditure. - On a per-kWh basis, increases in IOU distribution costs since 2014 represent over 30% of the overall national-average increase in retail electricity rates. - Regional spending growth has ranged from 2-8%/yr, with larger estimated rate impacts in CAISO, then NYISO & ISO-NE, and then the Southeast, MISO & PJM (see figure). - Some utilities are planning for significantly increased distribution system spending. Planned spending on managing the existing system (asset replacement, safety & reliability, and resilience are all important drivers) exceeds that for capacity expansion. - IOU rate increase requests ($18 billion in 2025) and public utility commission (PUC) approval levels (average of 64% of requested amounts from 2021-2025) have recently hit multi-decadal highs. - PUCs in New England and the Southeast have recently approved a greater fraction of rate requests (>75%, on average) than in ther regions, while PUCs in California and the Southeast have generally authorized higher equity returns than in other regions. - Regulators have many tools to tackle potential misalignments between utility and customer interests and, more specifically, to optimize and reduce distribution costs. Shorter-term options include those related to return on equity, capital structure, depreciation, trackers, construction work in progress, and securitization. Longer-term options include performance-based regulation and a wide variety of planning-related requirements. All options embed important tradeoffs.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗
DOE OSTI2025

Equitable Urban Electric Vehicle Charging: Feasibility and Benefits of Streetlight Charging in Kansas City Right-of-Way

With an increasing global emphasis on sustainability, electric vehicles (EVs) play a crucial role in reducing urban pollution and carbon emissions. For EVs to be widely adopted, equitable and convenient access to charging infrastructure is essential. Equity in this paper refers to the proactive engagement with the community to ensure that the benefits of streetlight charging are distributed equitably across diverse neighborhoods in Kansas City, providing fair charging opportunities and resources to all community members. This research explores the potential of utilizing streetlights—ubiquitous elements of urban electrical infrastructure—as low-cost, equitable EV charging solutions. Compared with conventional chargers, streetlight charging offers several notable advantages, including proximity to roadways, potential boosts to the local economy, and easier usage due to city ownership. These chargers also leverage existing power setups to minimize costs and maximize efficiency by reutilizing existing structures. In this manuscript, we introduce a systematic framework to develop, analyze, and evaluate a scalable and cost-effective streetlight charging solution. Initially, we employ a two-tiered site selection framework that accounts for both charging demand and equity considerations to identify optimal locations for streetlight chargers. We then assess the feasibility of these chargers through observational data from 23 units installed in Kansas City, Missouri, comparing their performance with traditional chargers. Here, our evaluation extends to the environmental impact, comparing reduced gasoline consumption and greenhouse gas (GHG) emission reductions between streetlights and regular charging stations. Our findings reveal that streetlight charging stations offer faster charging speeds than conventional stations, validating their viability for EV charging. Additionally, the duration of stay at streetlight chargers tends to be shorter, likely due to parking constraints or associated costs. Furthermore, streetlight-powered chargers demonstrate considerable environmental advantages, achieving 11.94% greater avoided gasoline consumption and 11.24% higher GHG reductions compared with regular charging stations, highlighting their substantial environmental benefits.

42 ENGINEERING↗
DOE OSTI2024

MSD CoP Webinar: Metrics for Human Wellbeing

Context: This webinar was hosted by the MultiSector Dynamics Community of Practice (MSD CoP; https://multisectordynamics.org). Abstract: Human well-being is an inherently multidimensional concept that broadly refers to what constitutes the "good life". Characterizing well-being requires a wide range of measures of quality of life. Taken together, these can provide a description of well-being and better guide decision making. In this webinar, our panel will first summarize the key themes and recommendations of interdisciplinary conversations that occurred during the course of a two-day, in-person workshop convened by PNNL September 27-28, 2023, which laid the foundations for a new research direction of well-being science and application. Next, they will present research exploring several dimensions of human well-being and their links to equity: energy security, food security, and economic measures. Finally, we will introduce the new Equity Working Group, gather community input to inform its activities, and provide avenues for ongoing engagement. Presenters : Stephanie Waldhoff (Joint Global Change Research Institute, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory; Invited Speaker), Brian O'Neill (Joint Global Change Research Institute, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory; Invited Speaker), Rebecca Saari (University of Waterloo; Co-Chair), Amanda Giang (University of British Columbia; Co-Chair), Sarah Fletcher (Stanford University; Co-Chair), and Matt Sparks (University of Waterloo; Communications Officer) Moderator: Pat M. Reed (MSD CoP Facilitation Team) This webinar was held on: May 29, 2024 from 1-2:15 PM ET

Equity↗
DOE OSTI2026

Wildfire-Power Grid Interactions: Feedback, Impacts, Monitoring, Modeling, and Mitigation Strategies

Wildfires are increasingly interacting with electric power systems through a two-way hazard chain: fires damage grid assets and trigger cascading outages, while grid faults can ignite new fires under hot, dry, and windy conditions. This review synthesizes the state of knowledge across five domains: (i) physical impacts of flames, heat, and smoke on lines, towers, insulators, and substations; (ii) power-infrastructure-initiated ignitions via conductor clash, high-impedance faults, and corona discharge; (iii) widespread blackouts and disproportionate societal impacts; (iv) multi-scale monitoring spanning laboratory tests, in-situ and grid-integrated sensors, and Earth observation; (v) coupled modeling that links fire behavior with grid operations; and (vi) technological and strategic mitigation pathways spanning prevention, response, and recovery. We integrate these domains into a novel 'feedback-aware' socio-technical framework. Through a longitudinal analysis (2005-2025) of global incidents, we identify that while vegetation contact remains the most frequent ignition source, aging infrastructure failure has emerged as a critical driver of catastrophic 'mega-fires'. We further identify persistent gaps, including limited interoperability of high-frequency grid and environmental data, scarce real-time data assimilation, and under-developed equity metrics for outage management. We conclude by outlining a research agenda to (1) deploy interoperable sensing architectures, (2) advance feedback-coupled fire-grid simulations, and (3) evaluate mitigation portfolios through techno-economic and fairness lenses. Recognizing wildfire-grid interactions as coupled socio-technical systems is essential for protecting infrastructure and communities and for ensuring reliable, sustainable electricity in a changing world.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗