Search NASA⌕ Search

SEARCH · Search NASA

Results for “utilities policy”

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.

At least 37 records · Page 2
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
NASA NTRS2015

An Integrated Framework for Modeling Air Carrier Behavior, Policy, and Impacts in the U.S. Air Transportation System

The implementation of the Next Generation Air Transportation System (NextGen) in the United States is an ongoing challenge for policymakers due to the complexity of the air transportation system (ATS) with its broad array of stakeholders and dynamic interdependencies between them. The successful implementation of NextGen has a hard dependency on the active participation of U.S. commercial airlines. To assist policymakers in identifying potential policy designs that facilitate the implementation of NextGen, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and LMI developed a research framework called the Air Transportation System Evolutionary Simulation (ATS-EVOS). This framework integrates large empirical data sets with multiple specialized models to simulate the evolution of the airline response to potential future policies and explore consequential impacts on ATS performance and market dynamics. In the ATS-EVOS configuration presented here, we leverage the Transportation Systems Analysis Model (TSAM), the Airline Evolutionary Simulation (AIRLINE-EVOS), the Airspace Concept Evaluation System (ACES), and the Aviation Environmental Design Tool (AEDT), all of which enable this research to comprehensively represent the complex facets of the ATS and its participants. We validated this baseline configuration of ATS-EVOS against Airline Origin and Destination Survey (DB1B) data and subject matter expert opinion, and we verified the ATS-EVOS framework and agent behavior logic through scenario-based experiments that explored potential implementations of a carbon tax, congestion pricing policy, and the dynamics for equipage of new technology by airlines. These experiments demonstrated ATS-EVOS's capabilities in responding to a wide range of potential NextGen-related policies and utility for decision makers to gain insights for effective policy design.

Horio, Brant M.↗
DOE OSTI2022

Valuing Resilience for Microgrids: Challenges, Innovative Approaches, and State Needs

The United States depends on the delivery of reliable, affordable, clean, and safe electricity. Electric utilities invest billions of dollars each year in generation, transmission, and distribution assets to meet this need. However, experiences with recent natural disasters of increasing frequency and duration demonstrate the shortcomings of this approach in the face of modern threats. Further, as customers rely on electricity for a broader range of important needs, such as transportation, as well as critical life-saving services and mission critical facilities such as water treatment, medical care, shelters, telecommunications, and more, the need to minimize the likelihood and impacts of outages grows. Against this backdrop, resilience has emerged as a key consideration to guide electricity spending, whether from utilities, customers, or taxpayers. Although reliability has been defined and measured for decades with broadly accepted metrics that measure how many customers lose power and at what frequency and duration, resilience considers the electricity system’s response to a disruption and its subsequent impacts on customers. Developing tools and methods to accurately assess the costs and benefits of resilience investments is a critical step toward the goal of mitigating the impacts of outages on customers and society. Today, electric system resilience is largely treated as an externality due to challenges estimating the costs of long-duration outages, impacts of outages on society, and increasing reliance on electricity for a growing set of interdependent services. These interdependencies include the water, wastewater, telecommunications, natural gas, and health sectors. Without knowing how much a given resilience investment will benefit customers or society more broadly, investors, policymakers, and regulators are less likely to make or approve such investments, and less able to prioritize those investments. State Energy Offices and public utility commissions (PUCs) lead the development of state-level energy policy and utility regulation, respectively, and each has interests in encouraging appropriate public and private investments in resilience. To this end, the National Association of State Energy Officials (NASEO) and National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners (NARUC), with the support of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Electricity (OE), formed a joint Microgrids State Working Group to explore the costs and benefits of microgrids, barriers to broader deployment of microgrids to meet resilience and other objectives, and policy and regulatory strategies to optimize investments in resilience, including but not limited to microgrids. Although no universally accepted valuation tool for resilience exists, National Laboratories, utilities, researchers, and state and federal agencies have collaborated to develop, apply, and improve a number of approaches to quantify resilience, several of which are still in progress at the time this report is published. This report seeks to share these important advances by discussing current definitions of resilience (Section 1), how microgrids are defined and used to meet resilience objectives (Section 2), new approaches to valuing resilience (Section 3), steps State Energy Offices and PUCs have taken to further resilience valuation efforts (Section 4), and finally, considerations and suggested next steps for State Energy Offices and PUCs (Section 5). Relevant examples of specific microgrid projects and resilience valuation efforts are included throughout the report. While this report is written specifically for NASEO and NARUC members, it may be useful for utilities, local governments, and individual customers interested in improving the way public and private dollars are spent to achieve resilience outcomes.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗
DOE OSTI2022

Feasibility of critical infrastructure protection using network functions for programmable and decoupled ICS policy enforcement over WAN

Industrial control systems (ICS) represent a major component of our critical infrastructure. With the increasing need for more control and monitoring of such systems, ICS have seen an increase in connectivity to wide area networks (WAN) exposing aging equipment to rapidly evolving cybersecurity threats. Furthermore, the ICS data requires a reliability measure from the networks for critical functions for infrastructure monitoring and control. Especially when remote plant sites are involved such as pipelines, energy distribution networks, and transportation, WAN transport impairments most often provide a best effort delivery with no strict reliability guarantees. Network functions can provide a vendor agnostic, programmable critical infrastructure protection with a single maintenance, policy determination, and reliability assurance surface. A network function (NF) can be utilized for policy enforcement over the communication between remote entities and the main control office. This paper presents the research on transparent integration with existing ICS without disrupting communications, resulting in minimal downtime while decoupling the fast paced evolution of defensive security measures from the upgrade cycle of expensive long term hardware. We report our measurements on the resource requirements and overhead in the network for successful NF insertion under a wide variety of network impairments (network packet delay, reordering, and loss). Our paired NF implementation provides a policy enforcement platform extensible to cover myriad cybersecurity-related communication goals, including packet signing for verification, encryption for data privacy, packet filtering and data diode operation (i.e. protecting against eavesdropping, packet injection, and denial-of-service). Furthermore, bundling communication specifications into packet flows allows for tunability in applying policies as coarse- or fine-grained as the needs of the operator. We report on network function resource requirements in the form of required queue depth and network utilization overhead to inform the decision making against hardware cost constraints.

42 ENGINEERING↗
NASA NTRS2021

Context and future directions for integrating forest carbon into sub-national climate mitigation planning in the RGGI region of the U.S.

International frameworks for climate mitigation that build from national actions have been developed under the United National Framework Convention on Climate Change and advanced most recently through the Paris Climate Agreement. In parallel, sub-national actors have set greenhouse gas (GHG) reduction goals and developed corresponding climate mitigation plans. Within the U.S., multi-state coalitions have formed to facilitate coordination of related science and policy. Here, utilizing the forum of the NASA Carbon Monitoring System’s Multi-State Working Group, we collected and reviewed climate mitigation plans for 11 states in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative region of the Eastern U.S. For each state we reviewed the (a) policy framework for climate mitigation, (b) GHG reduction goals, (c) inclusion of forest activities in the state’s climate action plan, (d) existing science used to quantify forest carbon estimates, and (e) stated needs for forest carbon monitoring science. Across the region, we found important differences across all categories. While all states have GHG reduction goals and framework documents, nearly three-quarters of all states do not account for forest carbon when planning GHG reductions; those that do account for forest carbon use a variety of scientific methods with various levels of planning detail and guidance. We suggest that a common, efficient, standardized forest carbon monitoring system would provide important benefits to states and the geographic region as a whole. In addition, such a system would allow for more effective transparency and progress tracking to support state, national, and international efforts to increase ambition and implementation of climate goals.

Rachel L Lamb↗
DOE OSTI2024

How to Design and Implement an Equitable Building Performance Standard: Lessons from the Building Performance Standards Technical Assistance Network

States and local governments seek to accomplish the intersecting goals of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, improving building operations, and bettering the daily lives of their communities. Building Performance Standards (BPS) have emerged as a critical policy lever to reach these intertwined climate and societal goals. These policies, if shaped and implemented well, have the chance to not only help reach our nation's climate, energy, and livability goals, but to do so with the active participation of those traditionally excluded from policy processes. This nascent policy movement provides jurisdictions across the country the opportunity to shape these policies from the outset to deliver comfort, health, and safety in our built environment for all. The US Department of Energy in partnership with our National Laboratories have been providing technical assistance for jurisdictions interested in, adopting, and implementing Building Performance Standards. Through this work, the BPS Technical Assistance Network (TA Network) has tracked and documented the innovative and equitable approaches to BPS across the country. The TA Network has crafted foundational technical analysis, such as building stock and emissions impacts, equity prioritization and peak load impacts, and aggregated cost benefit analysis. And by combining powerful technical analysis with dissemination of best practices resources to support equitable implementation, the TA Network provides jurisdictions with the tools and support necessary to embark on their ambitious policy goals.

building performance standards↗
DOE OSTI2020

Interconnection Standards for Combined Heat and Power (CHP) - State Standards that Impact Interconnection to the Electric Distribution Grid

This Issue Brief examines state interconnection policies that apply to CHP throughout the United States. It discusses barriers to CHP interconnection and describes elements of effective interconnection standards. The information in this document is intended to help inform state regulators, policy makers, utility personnel, electricity customers, and other stakeholders about the current status of CHP interconnection requirements, and how the interconnection process could be improved to accelerate the adoption of CHP.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗
DOE OSTI2026

Navigating United States Standards and Regulation for Digital Energy Systems

This report provides an analysis of the U.S. standards and regulatory landscape for digital energy systems, focusing on cybersecurity, safety, and reliability requirements. It examines the interplay between federal mandates, state regulations, voluntary industry standards, and utility-specific policies, highlighting critical gaps between compliance and real-world risk mitigation. While NERC CIP standards enforce cybersecurity for Bulk Electric System assets, distribution-level infrastructure and emerging technologies often fall outside mandatory oversight, creating vulnerabilities. The report identifies systemic challenges such as reliance on self-attestation, uneven state adoption of safety codes, and lagging standards for advanced technologies like battery energy storage and inverter-based resources. Through a detailed gap analysis, it underscores the urgency of proactive risk-based approaches, independent verification, and strategic engagement with state and federal entities. Recommendations include adopting tiered security frameworks, strengthening procurement practices, and addressing emerging technology risks to ensure resilient and secure digital energy infrastructure. This guidance is intended for utilities, regulators, and stakeholders navigating compliance obligations and seeking to enhance cybersecurity and safety beyond minimum standards.

24 - POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗
DOE OSTI2021

Policy and Regulatory Environment for Utility-Scale Energy Storage: Bangladesh

Bangladesh has experienced significant economic growth and poverty reduction over the past several decades. Recognizing the central role electricity plays in economic development, the Government of Bangladesh (GOB) has established policies to accelerate the growth of the electric power sector. The Bangladesh power grid is transforming into one marked by declining reliance on domestic natural gas reserves and oil-based rental power plants, increasing renewable energy contribution, and shifting demand patterns. The GOB is now reconsidering its prior plans to increase the share of coal capacity in the generation mix to meet demand, shifting its focus instead to electricity imports from neighboring countries, nuclear generation, liquified natural gas imports, and domestic renewable resources such as wind and solar. However, investments in the transmission and distribution system, as well as ancillary services, have not kept pace with investments in generation resources over the past decade. Thus, Bangladesh electricity consumers still experience outages and poor power quality despite adequate installed capacity. On the demand side, population growth and industrialization have fueled steady growth in electricity consumption as efforts to expand access to electricity enabled near-universal electricity access by mid-2020. The combined changes in the mix of generation resources and patterns of electricity demand present new challenges and opportunities in operating and maintaining a reliable power system. Energy storage has the potential to help meet these challenges and accelerate Bangladesh’s energy transition. Declining costs for some energy storage technologies make them increasingly cost-effective solutions to provide a wide range of grid services. Previous analyses of energy storage in the region have identified several potential applications for storage at the bulk system level, including energy arbitrage, ancillary services, and transmission network support. The potential for storage to meet these needs depends on many factors, including physical characteristics of the power system and the policy and regulatory environments in which these energy storage assets would operate. This report applies an Energy Storage Readiness Assessment the National Renewable Energy Laboratory developed for policy makers and regulators to identify priority areas of focus as they continue to develop the appropriate suite of policies, programs, and regulations to enable storage deployment. This assessment uses a simple evaluation scheme to identify the barriers and opportunities for utility-scale energy storage within Bangladesh’s policy and regulatory environment.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗
DOE OSTI2021

Renewable energy analysis in indigenous communities using bottom-up demand prediction

This paper provides a methodology for the holistic analysis of hybrid renewable energy systems in rural communities. Electric demand is an important component for modeling and analysis of renewable energy systems. Typically, electric demand data is not available due to the internal privacy policies of utility providers. Therefore, this study proposes the use of bottom-up approaches for the development of the electric demand profile, considering the general homogeneity of residential and commercial buildings in rural communities. As a test case, this study develops the electric demand profile and investigates the technical and environmental feasibility of a hybrid renewable energy system for the New Town community on the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation (FBIR) in North Dakota. This study conducts the hybrid renewable energy system’s analysis by developing scripts in the LK scripting language and integrating System Advisor Model software’s open-source modules for modeling of renewable energy systems. Here, the results for the validation testbed of this study show that hybrid renewable resources have higher ratios of energy used for self-consumption to the total energy generated compared to stand-alone wind and PV farms.

29 ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY↗
DOE OSTI2022

A System Approach to Deep Heating Savings Through Measurement, Management, and Motivation

Across multi-tenant commercial office and multifamily buildings, centrally metered fuel use represents a substantial fraction of whole-building energy use. Energy audit practitioners understand that improving heating distribution efficiency is typically more of an opportunity than combustion efficiency and that differing thermal comfort preferences between tenants are the bane of operators across these building typologies. There is an unmet market need for retrofit technologies that allow for the delivery of the right amount of heat to the right spaces, at the right time. The Energy Management and Information System (EMIS) package fills this gap through enhanced controls and metering, incorporating low-cost sensors and wireless communication infrastructure to provide a platform for ongoing commissioning and tenant feedback, including heat cost allocation. With support from the US DOE Building Technologies Office, Steven Winter Associates, Inc. (SWA) partnered with Sentient Buildings, E Source, building owners, and utility and policy stakeholders, to demonstrate a market viable EMIS that achieves a reduction in space heating energy use by reducing heating load, improving control, and positively impacting behavior while providing an acceptable financial return. In this study, EMIS packages were implemented in two New York City multifamily rental buildings. Both buildings conducted basic mechanical work (e.g., repairing steam traps) to ensure the heating system was operating well before any tenant feedback was layered in. Heating Energy Use Reports (HEUR) were created to provide tenants with social comparisons and energy savings tips to influence their behavior; these were provided monthly to all tenants in both buildings. Additionally, one building allocated heating costs to a portion of the tenants. Heat cost allocation (HCA) has a long history in the European Union (EU), although it is not common in the US or in steam-heated buildings. SWA leveraged existing EU best practices and stakeholder feedback to develop a Heat Cost Allocation algorithm that was considered equitable and intuitive. Energy use and tenant behavior impacts were tracked throughout the study. The basic mechanical repair work saved between 11-20% of heating energy. Those savings rose to 17-24% with the addition of tenant feedback. While it may not be possible to precisely determine the impact of COVID-19 on research studies like this, there may have been additional savings realized had the study taken place in a period of normal occupancy patterns. These types of central heating systems have been a blind spot for utilities, who have traditionally had little visibility into detailed behind-the-meter gas usage. Heating energy savings stayed consistent during the coldest months, indicating the potential for utilities to utilize EMIS packages for peak gas demand reductions or demand response programs. Tenant comfort was also improved. Post installation, room temperatures more closely matched thermostat set points. Perhaps due to this greater level of control, the vast majority of tenants being billed for heating were accepting of the allocation costs. And tenants receiving heat cost allocations were more likely to reduce their thermostat setpoints than tenants receiving behavioral feedback without financial impacts were. Variation in building specifics makes it difficult to provide precise energy and financial savings estimates. But within the range of expected conditions, the study identified a few key variables that can have the greatest impact on financial returns: the cost of fuel, the ability and willingness to allocate heating costs to tenants, and a well-functioning heating system as a starting point. This study focused on two multifamily buildings, but additional use cases, such as commercial buildings and affordable housing, should be explored to better understand the full market potential. While this type of upgrade has the potential for deep energy reductions and cost savings, future projects should take into account the balance of costs and benefits between owners and tenants, especially in the affordable, regulated, or other low-to-moderate income (LMI) segments of the market. Rent credits, utility allowances, or a shared savings program are possible options to accelerate adoption of this strategy in these market segments.

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗
DOE OSTI2022

Variational multiscale reinforcement learning for discovering reduced order closure models of nonlinear spatiotemporal transport systems

Abstract A central challenge in the computational modeling and simulation of a multitude of science applications is to achieve robust and accurate closures for their coarse-grained representations due to underlying highly nonlinear multiscale interactions. These closure models are common in many nonlinear spatiotemporal systems to account for losses due to reduced order representations, including many transport phenomena in fluids. Previous data-driven closure modeling efforts have mostly focused on supervised learning approaches using high fidelity simulation data. On the other hand, reinforcement learning (RL) is a powerful yet relatively uncharted method in spatiotemporally extended systems. In this study, we put forth a modular dynamic closure modeling and discovery framework to stabilize the Galerkin projection based reduced order models that may arise in many nonlinear spatiotemporal dynamical systems with quadratic nonlinearity. However, a key element in creating a robust RL agent is to introduce a feasible reward function, which can be constituted of any difference metrics between the RL model and high fidelity simulation data. First, we introduce a multi-modal RL to discover mode-dependant closure policies that utilize the high fidelity data in rewarding our RL agent. We then formulate a variational multiscale RL (VMRL) approach to discover closure models without requiring access to the high fidelity data in designing the reward function. Specifically, our chief innovation is to leverage variational multiscale formalism to quantify the difference between modal interactions in Galerkin systems. Our results in simulating the viscous Burgers equation indicate that the proposed VMRL method leads to robust and accurate closure parameterizations, and it may potentially be used to discover scale-aware closure models for complex dynamical systems.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗
DOE OSTI2024

Security constrained optimal power shutoff for wildfire risk mitigation

Abstract Electric grid faults are increasingly the source of ignition for major wildfires. To reduce the likelihood of such ignitions in high risk situations, utilities use preemptive de‐energization of power lines, commonly referred to as Public Safety Power Shutoffs (PSPS). Besides raising challenging trade‐offs between power outages and wildfire safety, PSPS removes redundancy from the network at a time when component faults are likely to happen. This may leave the network particularly vulnerable to unexpected line faults that may occur while the PSPS is in place. Previous works have not explicitly considered the impacts of these outages. To address this gap, the Security Constrained Optimal Power Shutoff problem is proposed which uses post‐contingency security constraints to model the impact of unexpected line faults when planning a PSPS. This model enables, for the first time, the exploration of a wide range of trade‐offs between both wildfire risk and pre‐ and post‐contingency load shedding when designing PSPS plans, providing useful insights for utilities and policy makers considering different approaches to PSPS. The efficacy of the model is demonstrated using the EPRI 39‐bus system as a case study. The results highlight the potential risks of not considering security constraints when planning PSPS and show that incorporating security constraints into the PSPS design process improves the resilience of current PSPS plans.

29 ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY↗
DOE OSTI2021

Impact of Connected Communities

Buildings account for 35% of CO 2 emissions and almost 40% of the United States’ energy use. High-performance homes and neighborhoods play an important role in supporting efforts to decarbonize the US power system by 2035. Significant reductions in CO 2 emissions within the residential sector can be realized through electrification of loads paired with the flexibility created by leveraging smart Internet of Things (IoT) capabilities to shift energy use based on grid signals, thus improving generation/distribution efficiency and maximizing the use of renewable generation capacity. All of this can be achieved while allowing smart home appliances and equipment to meet homeowner needs – including reducing power bills - while optimizing operation in conjunction with the grid using novel control techniques. The Grid-Interactive Efficient Buildings Roadmap by the US Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Building Technologies Office (BTO) notes that implementing grid-interactive efficient building (GEB) technology has the potential to reduce CO 2 emissions by 80 million tons/year—roughly equivalent to 17 million cars. To achieve this vision, the US Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL)—in collaboration with Southern Company Research & Development, Alabama Power, Georgia Power, BTO and the US DOE’s Office of Electricity (OE) —is developing and demonstrating novel connected communities at two locations. Southern Company in turn engaged with industry partners, including design firms, residential developers, and residential HVAC and appliance manufacturers because their participation would be critical to the success of the initial research project, as well as the future scaling to the Southern Company service territory and beyond. Impacts of the Connected Communities projects in Alabama and Georgia are outlined including: energy, grid services and data management learnings; homeowner feedback; vendor engagement; adoption by utilities; technical, policy and business model challenges.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗
DOE OSTI2024

Assessing Customer Experience and Business Models around Price-to-Device Communication and Smart Control Pathways in CalFlexHub

California is facing three major challenges in electrical grid operation: renewable overgeneration, steep evening ramping, and growing peak demand. The state has identified dynamic retail price response as a key strategy evidenced by CPUC’s Dynamic Rates proceeding and CEC’s Load Management Standards. Furthermore, the CEC launched a $16M “California Load Flexibility Research and Deployment Hub (CalFlexHub)” administered by Berkeley Lab to accelerate price-response flexible load technologies in buildings and EV charging. There are more than 16 laboratory and field demonstration projects in CalFlexHub, each demonstrating innovative automated price-response technologies. CalFlexHub tests various pathways through which hourly price signals and triggered control commands are communicated to load-flexible devices such as smart thermostats, heat pumps, water heaters, and EVs. We identified seven unique communication and control pathways, which involve combinations of third-party cloud, device OEM’s cloud, building central gateway, and local controller in between the price server and the load-flexible devices. It is important for utilities and policy makers to understand the long-term implications of each pathway in designing future programs and creating related policies and mandates for market transformation. We propose an evaluation framework including the following aspects: ● Functionality: connectivity and uptime, resilience, and optimization; ● Customer experience: simplicity in setup, troubleshooting support, continuity, customer choice, first cost, and ongoing cost; ● Business model and scalability: advance interoperability, holistic solution, bridge unique gap, customer base, and value streams and pricing structures. In this paper, we identify emerging business models associated with each communication pathway and discuss their positive features and challenges from the above aspects.

Liu, Jingjing↗
NASA NTRS1999

Scheduling for Parallel Supercomputing: A Historical Perspective of Achievable Utilization

The NAS facility has operated parallel supercomputers for the past 11 years, including the Intel iPSC/860, Intel Paragon, Thinking Machines CM-5, IBM SP-2, and Cray Origin 2000. Across this wide variety of machine architectures, across a span of 10 years, across a large number of different users, and through thousands of minor configuration and policy changes, the utilization of these machines shows three general trends: (1) scheduling using a naive FIFO first-fit policy results in 40-60% utilization, (2) switching to the more sophisticated dynamic backfilling scheduling algorithm improves utilization by about 15 percentage points (yielding about 70% utilization), and (3) reducing the maximum allowable job size further increases utilization. Most surprising is the consistency of these trends. Over the lifetime of the NAS parallel systems, we made hundreds, perhaps thousands, of small changes to hardware, software, and policy, yet, utilization was affected little. In particular these results show that the goal of achieving near 100% utilization while supporting a real parallel supercomputing workload is unrealistic.

Jones, James Patton↗
DOE OSTI2020

Policy and Regulatory Environment for Utility-Scale Energy Storage: India

This report is part of a series investigating the potential for utility-scale energy storage in South Asia. The first part of the work is focused on opportunities and barriers for energy storage within existing policy and regulatory frameworks in the region. This report applies the previously-developed Energy Storage Readiness Assessment to evaluate the policy and regulatory environment for energy storage in India. Forthcoming reports will expand this analysis to other countries in South Asia. These evaluations are designed to provide insights on the opportunities and barriers for energy storage growth and deployment in each country. The second part of this work consists of techno-economic analysis to understand the drivers of energy storage investments in South Asia. Using NREL’s power system planning and operational models of South Asia, this analysis will identify potential storage applications and growth under various cost, policy, and demand growth scenarios. In addition, the regulatory and policy barriers and incentive mechanisms identified in the first task will be incorporated into the modeling task to understand their impact on energy storage deployment and operation. Together these studies will inform the applications and value of energy storage on South Asia power systems and policy and regulatory pathways to realize this value.

29 ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY↗
DOE OSTI2026

The global policy landscape of ISO 50001 energy management systems

While many options exist to improve industrial demand-side energy efficiency, energy management systems (EnMSs)—particularly those aligned with ISO 50001—are proven to drive continuous and meaningful energy performance improvements. Governments leverage these EnMSs in their policies to advance national objectives including enhancing industrial competitiveness and achieving environmental goals. Existing research has focused on the impact of EnMSs at the company level, while comprehensive work on EnMSs in a global policy context is lacking. We seek to close this gap by investigating the extent to which current national policies incorporate the utilization of EnMSs, particularly the ISO 50001 standard. Our paper employs a hybrid approach, combining a literature review and expert interviews across 28 governments representing > 86% of global primary energy consumption. We dissect policy mechanisms, governance levels, underlying motivations, and trends in present EnMS policies. We find that > 96% of the investigated countries include EnMSs within their policy scope; 90% of policies including EnMSs utilize the ISO 50001 standard in some capacity. Primary policy motivations include decarbonization, energy savings for industrial competitiveness, and energy system resilience. We highlight that in the EnMS context, policy mixes—combining economic incentives, regulatory instruments, and information-based approaches—are more effective than standalone measures. Our work provides a novel global overview of governmental EnMS policies, moving beyond whether EnMS should be adopted to focus on how they can be implemented most effectively.

Moreno, Francisco Luis↗