SEARCH · Search NASA
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.
Quote a phrase for an exact phrase match. Source license links do not imply unrestricted reuse.
Lack of harmonic rich datasets limits the ability to have fine grained load models at grid edge. We aim to develop mathematical models for power electronic based load combinations at grid edge to help replicate current and future evolving load conditions
While electricity planning practices vary by state and utility based on utility type and market structure, integrated resource planning (IRP) remains a prominent vehicle — even in states with centrally-organized wholesale electricity markets. IRP focuses on meeting forecasted long-term electricity needs. Typically, utilities have not considered impacts of design and operation of the low-voltage distribution network in IRP. With advanced capabilities of grid-edge technologies to generate and store electricity and provide load flexibility, and large utility investments in distribution systems, it's increasingly important to consider at least some distribution planning elements in IRP. This report considers the value proposition for doing so, such as reducing utility costs through resource co-optimization and strategic siting of grid-edge resources, and idenfities the most important touchpoints between planning for bulk power and distribution systems and provide a range of tactics for integrating these two processes.
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.
Microgrids are evolving as promising options to enhance reliability of the connected transmission and distribution systems. Traditional design and deployment of microgrids require significant engineering analysis. However, Microgrid Building Blocks (MBB), consisting of modular blocks that integrate seamlessly to form effective microgrids, are promising technologies to enable faster and broader adoption of microgrids. Back-to-Back converter placed at the point of common coupling of microgrid is an integral part of MBB. This paper presents applications of MBB to decouple power quality issues in grid-microgrid network serving power quality sensitive critical loads such as data centers, new grid-edge technologies such as vehicle-to-grid generation, and emergency condition loads such as electric vehicle charging loads during evacuation prior disaster events. Simulation results show that MBB effectively decouple the power quality issues across networks and allow network with low power quality to transfer high-power quality power to connected networks during emergency conditions.
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.
The accelerating deployment of digital energy infrastructure, ranging from inverter-based resources (IBRs), battery energy storage systems (BESS), to advanced grid control platforms, has brought unprecedented visibility, flexibility, and efficiency to the electric grid. However, this digital transformation also introduces new cybersecurity challenges, particularly in the form of supply chain risks and operational blind spots at the grid edge. Over the past year, the Department of Energy’s Office of Cybersecurity, Energy Security, and Emergency Response (CESER), through its Rapid Risk Assessment initiative, along with the Grid Deployment Office (GDO), through its Technical Assistance for Digital Assurance (TADA) initiative, have supported a series of on-site network engagements led by Idaho National Laboratory (INL). These engagements, conducted in partnership with asset owners across the country, have focused on identifying real-world vulnerabilities and misconfigurations in operational environments, many of which are not detectable through remote assessments or traditional compliance audits. The goal of this report is to distill key findings and lessons learned during network hunt engagements from INL’s fiscal year (FY) 2024 - 2025. It is intended to help asset owners—regardless of their participation in the program—better understand the evolving threat landscape and adopt practical measures to secure their digital energy infrastructure.
Utilities have conducted distribution planning since they first began building and operating electricity systems. But filing these plans for regulatory and stakeholder review is a relatively recent phenomenon. This report summarizes legislative and regulatory requirements for regulated electric utilities to file some type of distribution system plan in 20 U.S. jurisdictions. Some plans focus on expedited cost recovery for certain types of distribution system improvements; other plans focus on investments for grid modernization or distributed energy resources. Increasingly, states are adopting requirements for Integrated Distribution Plans. Such plans provide holistic grid investment strategies that address state and local policies and increasing complexity at the grid edge. The report covers the following topics for distribution system plans, highlighting advanced practices: -State goals and objectives -Procedural requirements -Forecasting loads and distributed energy resources -Hosting capacity analysis -Baseline information requirements -Grid modernization strategy -Grid needs assessment -Non-wires solutions -Reliability and resilience analyses -Stakeholder engagement -Equity -Pilots -Coordination with other planning processes The report includes links to legislation; regulatory requirements, proceedings, and orders; and filed utility plans. The U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Electricity provided funding support.
This project involved the design, development, and testing of a commercial smart service panel. It includes an innovative AI-driven control method to manage smart functions of the panel and a technical-economic feasibility assessment for enhancing building energy resilience and grid-edge technology integration.
Load growth at the grid edge is driving increased attention to the distribution system and its ability to enable customer technology adoption in an affordable and timely manner. Key industry stakeholders, including electric utilities and regulators, can benefit from strategies to manage and balance customer needs with infrastructure investments, such as demand flexibility. This report focuses on demand flexibility—the ability to reduce, shift, shed, generate, or modulate loads in response to building and grid needs—to reduce the need for costly grid upgrades by deferring investment needs and increase system reliability by shifting electricity usage during periods of high risk. Specifically, we focus on the emerging characteristics of business models for demand flexibility as a framework to understand how demand flexibility programs generate value. In this report, we focus on demand flexibility program stakeholder ecosystem management strategies, which provide information on value delivery and describe how program implementers leverage partner capabilities and collaborate to deliver customer and grid benefits. This report discusses the role of stakeholder ecosystem management in demand flexibility programs, identifies existing challenges to effective stakeholder management, and describes lessons learned. This report is part of a series that includes reports on value propositions, customer relationship management strategies, and program life cycle.
Load growth at the grid edge is driving increased attention to the distribution system and its ability to enable customer technology adoption in an affordable and timely manner. Key industry stakeholders, including electric utilities and regulators, can benefit from strategies to manage and balance customer needs with infrastructure investments, such as demand flexibility. This report focuses on demand flexibility—the ability to reduce, shift, shed, generate, or modulate loads in response to building and grid needs—to reduce the need for costly grid upgrades by deferring investment needs and increase system reliability by shifting electricity usage during periods of high risk. Specifically, we focus on the emerging characteristics of business models for demand flexibility as a framework to understand how demand flexibility programs generate value. In this report, we focus on demand flexibility program customer relationship management strategies, which provide information on value creation and focus on ensuring customers can navigate programs smoothly. This report discusses the role of customer relationship management strategies in demand flexibility programs, characterizes customer relationship management strategies that can be considered during program design and implementation, identifies existing challenges to customer relationship management strategies, and describes lessons learned. This report is part of a series that includes reports on value propositions, stakeholder ecosystem management, and program life cycle.
Load growth at the grid edge is driving increased attention to the distribution system and its ability to enable customer technology adoption in an affordable and timely manner. Key industry stakeholders, including electric utilities and regulators, can benefit from strategies to manage and balance customer needs with infrastructure investments, such as demand flexibility. This report focuses on demand flexibility—the ability to reduce, shift, shed, generate, or modulate loads in response to building and grid needs—to reduce the need for costly grid upgrades by deferring investment needs and increase system reliability by shifting electricity usage during periods of high risk. Specifically, we focus on the emerging characteristics of business models for demand flexibility as a framework to understand how demand flexibility programs generate value. In this report, we focus on demand flexibility value propositions, which provide information on value creation and describe how programs deliver clear benefits that address customer and grid needs. This report discusses the role of value propositions in demand flexibility programs, provides an overview of value propositions for a range of demand flexibility stakeholders, identifies existing challenges to establishing an effective value proposition, and describes lessons learned. This report is part of a series that includes reports on customer relationship management strategies, stakeholder ecosystem management, and program life cycle.
Load growth at the grid edge is driving increased attention to the distribution system and its ability to enable customer technology adoption in an affordable and timely manner. Key industry stakeholders, including electric utilities and regulators, can benefit from strategies to manage and balance customer needs with infrastructure investments, such as demand flexibility. This report focuses on demand flexibility—the ability to reduce, shift, shed, generate, or modulate loads in response to building and grid needs—to reduce the need for costly grid upgrades by deferring investment needs and increase system reliability by shifting electricity usage during periods of high risk. Specifically, we focus on the emerging characteristics of business models for demand flexibility as a framework to understand how demand flexibility programs generate value. In this report, we focus on the life cycle of demand flexibility programs, which provides information on value creation and describes the various deployment phases program implementers navigate from initial program conceptualization through to program expansion and replication to new customer segments and regions. This report characterizes the key phases of the demand flexibility program life cycle, identifies existing challenges across the program deployment phases, and describes lessons learned. This report is part of a series that includes reports on customer relationship management strategies, stakeholder ecosystem management, and program life cycle.
The rapid digitalization of the electric grid - driven by the integration of inverter-based resources (IBRs), battery energy storage systems (BESS), and advanced grid control platforms - has significantly enhanced grid efficiency, visibility, and flexibility. However, this evolution also introduces new cybersecurity risks, particularly through supply chain dependencies and operational blind spots at the grid edge. To address these challenges, Idaho National Laboratory (INL), through the Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Cybersecurity, Energy Security, and Emergency Response (CESER) Rapid Risk initiative, conducted a series of rapid risk assessment engagements with energy organizations across the United States. Drawing on lessons learned from these engagements, INL developed the following threat hunting guide for asset owners and operators (AOOs) to enhance their cybersecurity visibility within BESS and IBR systems. The guide demonstrates how to use passive network monitoring to baseline device behavior, detect adversarial activity, and investigate anomalies without disrupting operations. By implementing these practices, energy sector stakeholders can improve coordination between cybersecurity and operations teams and strengthen the resilience of distributed energy resources (DERs) within the modern power grid. Prior to implementing any network monitoring, packet capture, or threat hunting activity described in this guide, AOOs are strongly advised to review applicable governance frameworks, legal requirements, and organizational policies. This guide is intended for informational and educational purposes only. It does not replace compliance with any federal, state, or local cybersecurity mandates or industry standards. Implementation of described configurations, technologies, or analytic workflows is performed at the discretion and responsibility of the asset owner and operator.
Increasing the efficiency and flexibility of electricity demand is necessary for ensuring a cost-effective and reliable transition to zero-carbon electricity systems. Such demand-side management (DSM) resources have been procured by utilities for decades via energy efficiency and demand response programs; however, the key drivers of program enrollment and customer participation levels remain poorly understood — even as governments and grid planners seek to scale up the deployment of DSM assets to meet climate targets. Here we systematically review the evidence on multiple factors that may influence customer enrollment and participation in building DSM programs, focusing primarily on residential and commercial buildings. We examine the contexts in which relationships between DSM factors and outcomes are most often explored and with which methods; we also score the strength, direction, and internal consistency of each factor's reported impact on the enrollment and participation outcomes. We find that studies most commonly assess the effects of economic incentives for load flexibility on program participation levels, often using simulation-based methods in lieu of measured data. Few studies focus on program enrollment outcomes or regulatory drivers of either enrollment or participation, and gaps are also evident in the coverage of emerging DSM opportunities like load electrification. Removal of structural barriers (e.g., the lack of controls infrastructure) and the use of third party services (e.g., load aggregators) are the factors with the largest positive impacts on DSM outcomes, but no single factor emerges as clearly most impactful. For a given factor, the range of reported impacts typically varies widely across the relevant studies reviewed. Our findings provide a snapshot of the state of knowledge about building DSM and customer decision-making, and they expose key gaps in understanding that must be filled if building DSM is to expand as a critical resource for operating clean power grids.
The evolving transformation with the proliferation of distributed energy resources and advanced metering, necessitates advanced distribution systems to integrate and orchestrate a large number of grid-edge devices while also serving multiple system-level objectives such as resilience, decarbonization, equity and other system mandates. The parallel deployment and control of resources towards achieving diverse objectives may lead to conflicts between applications that want to control overlapping sets of device setpoints, potentially leading to oscillatory behavior and suboptimal performance. This work aims at leveraging game theoretic framework to drive cooperative behavior among competitive applications. The work proposes a weighted-consensus based game design to facilitate conflict resolution through consensus-building iterations for modular platform. Simulation-based evaluation on a sample test system demonstrates the performance the proposed deconfliction strategy in resolving operational conflicts and achieving close-to-optimal trade off among the applications. Results also compare the proposed strategy with a distribution optimization approach and illustrate it effectiveness in diverse apps regardless of their design while also incentivizing apps with flexible design.
Grid edge renewable energy resources, such as rooftop solar photovoltaics, closely interact with consumer load profiles. Therefore, forecasting future electricity demand, ideally at the individual household level, is indispensable. In this paper, we present a transfer learning enhanced household load profile forecasting method. First, we tune a long short-term memory forecasting model to perform day-ahead prediction of household electricity load profiles. Then we improve these individualized models using transfer learning, and we use k-means clustering to create optimal source data sets. We find average improvements of 4.38% (largest improvement of 10.71%) when the entire data set was used to train the source model and 2.45% (largest improvement of 11.57%) in the mean absolute error when households were first clustered and used to train separate source models for each cluster. We find that transfer learning with clustered data can effectively boost the forecasting performance of the LSTM models. We use realistic household power measurements for 148 real residential households in Austin, Texas.
Power distribution systems are transitioning towards a future with large numbers of controllable grid-edge devices and distributed generation, as well as more complex operational objectives. This evolution requires a new distribution management approach, and modular applications can play a significant role. Thus, new strategies to coordinate independent applications with diverging operational goals are necessary. In this paper, we propose a novel optimization-based deconflictor to facilitate coordination in future advanced distribution management systems.
The Center for Alternative Synchronization and Timing (CAST) views Precision Time Protocol (PTP) and Network Time Protocol (NTP) as critical elements of the grid, from generation to the grid edge. This tech bulletin discusses the operation of NTP. The document shows not only commercial but also open-source applications. In some cases, the commercial applications may already have existing feature sets to secure and monitor NTP streams. From a security standpoint, using subscription NTP is risky unless the open bidirectional ports on local firewalls and routers are properly monitored and controlled.