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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 379 records · Page 21

Phase Identification in Real Distribution Networks with High PV Penetration Using Advanced Metering Infrastructure Data

Many distribution network monitoring and control applications - including state estimation, Volt/VAr optimization, and network reconfiguration - rely on accurate network models; however, the network models maintained by utilities can become outdated because of restoration activities, network reconfiguration, and missing data. With the widespread deployment of advanced metering infrastructure (AMI), abundant measurement data from low-voltage secondary networks are available. The AMI measurement data can be used for phase identification to improve the network models. Although the existing phase identification techniques work well in passive distribution feeders that do not have photovoltaic (PV) generation, they can fail to accurately identify the phases in the presence of PV. This paper proposes a robust phase identification algorithm based on supervised machine learning that accurately identifies the AMI meter phase connectivity in the presence of significant PV generation. The proposed algorithm does not require network topology information or feeder-head measurement data. The algorithm is validated using the AMI measurement data collected in the field and the field-validated phase connectivity database on two real distribution feeders from San Diego Gas & Electric Company that have significant PV generation.

advanced metering infrastructure (AMI)↗

University Research Reactor & Infrastructure Awards

Presentation covering the FY2021 University Scientific Infrastructure funding program and the NSUF role in administering it. To be presented at the Nuclear Science User Facilities (NSUF) annual program review on November 9, 2021.

46 INSTRUMENTATION RELATED TO NUCLEAR SCIENCE AND ↗

Community Engagement Tips for EV Infrastructure Deployment

This Joint Office of Energy and Transportation help sheet provides tips for conducting community engagement to support electric vehicle (EV) infrastructure planning and deployment. This document is a tool and an informative resource to be used in conjunction with other guidance. It is not intended to set policy or establish or replace any standards under state or federal law applicable to public notice or community engagement.

ADVANCED PROPULSION SYSTEMS,ENERGY PLANNING, POLIC↗

Development of a Geothermal Module in reV: Quantifying the Geothermal Potential while Accounting for the Geospatial Intersection of the Grid Infrastructure and Land Use Characteristics

The Renewable Energy Potential (reV) model is a geospatial platform for estimating technical potential and developing renewable energy supply curves, initially developed for wind and solar technologies. The model evaluates deployment constraints, considering land use, environmental, and cultural factors, and estimates the distance to existing grid features to connect future plants (Maclaurin et al., 2021). A pressing deficiency in the reV model, however, is representation of geothermal electricity generation technologies. To address this gap, we developed a novel geothermal generation module for reV that allows for representation and analysis at the same level of detail as other renewable technologies. This paper describes our process for evaluating data sources for the modeling, and presents five preliminary reV geothermal results. More specifically, we present two sets of resource data that represent upper and lower bounds for geothermal potential. We then present several sensitivity runs using the upper bound resource data; the results are encouraging that levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) can be reduced by optimizing the location and estimated capacity of the spatially diverse geothermal resource while considering the distance to existing grid infrastructure. Our preliminary supply curves and levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) results should be considered with care due to the highly uncertainty in geothermal resource potential data. We present median LCOE values for the conterminous U.S. for five scenarios: four hydrothermal (3.5km depth) and one EGS (4.5km depth). The capital and operating costs for each respective technology are modeled. We also compare results using two different resource data sources.

exclusions↗

2024 Sustainable Aviation Energy Conference: 5 Key Messages From the Alternative Fueling (Energy) Infrastructure Workshop

At the 2024 Sustainable Aviation Energy Conference, more than 100 aviation leaders gathered in Dallas, Texas, to discuss collaboration and research needed to clear the path to widespread adoption of sustainable aviation technologies. During open workshops, participants from state and federal agencies; airports; aircraft and engine manufacturers; liquid fuel producers; and other stakeholder groups brainstormed the biggest barriers and opportunities for realizing a sustainable aviation ecosystem. This fact sheets presents five key messages and discussion points that emerged during a workshop on alternative fueling (energy) infrastructure.

advanced air mobility↗

Data Analytics and Visualization of Energy Systems for Critical Infrastructure Insights

Modernization of energy systems including transportation facilities provides opportunities for increased efficiency, expansion of commerce and meeting industry and federal goals. A significant increase in electrical demand is projected to meet these needs, which concentrates at facilities such as airports. For example, Xcel Energy working with two airports in their service area recently published information projecting an up to fivefold increase in electricity demand in the next 25 years [1]. Concurrently, the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) recently surveyed 30 commercial service airports identifying more than 300 outages of more than 5 minutes between 2015 and 2022 [2]. Power, reliability, and resilience planning becomes more important to safely maintain operations and the flow of commerce with fewer energy carriers providing necessary energy to safely move passengers and goods. NREL proposes to develop methodologies to allow owners, utilities, and federal agencies to dynamically analyze, forecast, and manage energy loads at airports, focused upon maintaining the flow of commerce in an efficient, sustainable, and resilient way. To address these energy challenges, a suite of technologies and methodologies can be leveraged to validate concepts, inform design, de-risk solutions and optimize energy management during deployment. These technologies include digitalization of energy systems, microgrid methodologies, and related energy technologies for building and vehicle loads. [1] Electrifying Airport Ecosystems - https://www.enterprisemobility.com/content/dam/enterpriseholdings/marketing/innovation-in-mobility/vehicle-innovation/airport-electrification-study-full-report-2024.pdf [2] Airport Infrastructure: Selected Airport's Efforts to Enhance Electrical Resilience https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-23-105203.

critcal infrastructure↗

Development of a Geothermal Module in reV: Quantifying the Geothermal Potential While Accounting for the Geospatial Intersection of the Grid Infrastructure and Land Use Characteristics: Preprint

The Renewable Energy Potential (reV) model is a geospatial platform for estimating technical potential and developing renewable energy supply curves, initially developed for wind and solar technologies. The model evaluates deployment constraints, considering land use, environmental, and cultural factors, and estimates the distance to existing grid features to connect future plants (Maclaurin et al., 2021). A pressing deficiency in the reV model, however, is representation of geothermal electricity generation technologies. To address this gap, we developed a novel geothermal generation module for reV that allows for representation and analysis at the same level of detail as other renewable technologies. This paper describes our process for evaluating data sources for the modeling, and presents five preliminary reV geothermal results. More specifically, we present two sets of resource data that represent upper and lower bounds for geothermal potential. We then present several sensitivity runs using the upper bound resource data; the results are encouraging that levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) can be reduced by optimizing the location and estimated capacity of the spatially diverse geothermal resource while considering the distance to existing grid infrastructure. Our preliminary supply curves and levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) results should be considered with care due to the highly uncertainty in geothermal resource potential data. We present median LCOE values for the conterminous U.S. for five scenarios: four hydrothermal (3.5km depth) and one EGS (4.5km depth). The capital and operating costs for each respective technology are modeled. We also compare results using two different resource data sources.

exclusions↗

Dover CoreGuard Ⓡ Cybersecurity Protections for Critical Energy Infrastructure Final Report

This report documents the status of technical objectives and activities for the Department of Energy (DOE) Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project, titled “Dover CoreGuard Ⓡ Cybersecurity Protections for Critical Energy Infrastructure” (Award No. DE-SC0023743), undertaken by Dover Microsystems, Inc., Wayland, MA. The Principal Investigator for this project was Dr. Stephen Papa, Dover’s Chief Technology Officer (CTO). The contract PoP (Period of Performance) is scheduled for completion by February 9, 2024.

99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS↗

Infrastructure improvements in the National Reactor Innovation Center Virtual Test Bed

The National Reactor Innovation Center’s (NRIC) mission is to support deployment of novel reactor concepts. This is achieved by providing physical and virtual spaces for building and testing various components, systems, and complete pilot plants. The Virtual Test Bed (VTB) represents the virtual counterpart to the physical test bed. The VTB is being developed in collaboration with the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Nuclear Energy Advanced Modeling and Simulation (NEAMS) program. The mission of the VTB is to accelerate the deployment and licensing of advanced reactors by leveraging state-of-the-art modeling and simulation (M&S) tools developed by the DOE NEAMS program. This is accomplished via three primary means: (1) openly hosting simulations that showcase analysis capabilities, (2) continuously testing the models hosted against code updates to avoid deprecation, and (3) filling key M&S gaps that are relevant for the physical NRIC test beds. The VTB repository consists of two sub-entities: • A documentation website detailing the models: https://mooseframework.inl.gov/virtual_test_bed • A GitHub repository that hosts the corresponding files: https://github.com/idaholab/virtual_test_bed. This paper presents the infrastructure added to the VTB in the last two fiscal years. Additional information about the VTB can be found in various publications [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8].

22 - GENERAL STUDIES OF NUCLEAR REACTORS↗

Systems Theory Principles and Complex Systems Engineering Concepts for Protection and Resilience in Critical Infrastructure: Lessons from the Nuclear Sector

Part of the Presidential Policy Directive 21 (PPD-21) (PPD 2013) mandate includes evaluating safety, security, and safeguards (or nonproliferation) mechanisms traditionally implemented within the nuclear reactors, materials, and waste sector of critical infrastructure—including a complex, dynamic set of risks and threats within an all-hazards approach. In response, research out of Sandia National Laboratories (Sandia) explores the ability of systems theory principles (hierarchy and emergence) and complex systems engineering concepts (multidomain interdependence) to better understand and address these risks and threats. Herein, this Sandia research explores the safety, safeguards, and security risks of three different nuclear sector-related activities—spent nuclear fuel transportation, small modular reactors, and portable nuclear power reactors—to investigate the complex and dynamic risk related to the PPD-21-mandated all-hazards approach. This research showed that a systems-theoretic approach can better identify inter-dependencies, conflicts, gaps, and leverage points across traditional safety, security, and safeguards hazard mitigation strategies in the nuclear reactors, materials, and waste sector. Resulting from this, mitigation strategies from applying systems theoretic principles and complex systems engineering concepts can be (1) designed to better capture interdependencies, (2) implemented to better align with real-world operational uncertainties, and (3) evaluated as a systems-level whole to better identify, characterize, and manage PPD-21's all hazards strategies.

42 ENGINEERING↗

Electrified autonomous freight benefit analysis on fleet, infrastructure and grid leveraging Grid-Electrified Mobility (GEM) model

Fast-growing freight activities over the decades have become one of the major contributors to air pollution, leading to many efforts in freight decarbonization and electrification. However, the development of freight electrification is slow due to technological uncertainty, slow charging, high capital cost, etc. This paper analyzes the potential impact and benefit of heavy-duty vehicle (HDV) electrification and automation on fleet cost, infrastructure cost, the electricity grid, and environmental outcomes. In this work, we extended the vehicle electrification benefit analysis tool: Grid-Electrified Mobility (GEM) model, which had primarily been used to study light-duty passenger vehicles (LDVs), to analyze heavy-duty vehicle electrification. The extended model is derived for freight transportation electrification, and different freight electrification and automation adoption scenarios were analyzed. We find that the increased penetration of automated electric freight fleets within other types of electrified freight fleets from 1% to 99% will result in an overall cost reduction of 18.2%, fleet size reduction of 20.4%, and lower peak load reduction of 14.3%.

33 ADVANCED PROPULSION SYSTEMS↗

A heuristic tool to assess regional impacts of renewable energy infrastructure on conservation areas

Wind and hydropower are important renewable components of national energy portfolios, but their infrastructure negatively affects biodiversity. Regional development requires identification of scenarios that minimize the cumulative impacts of multiple facilities. We introduce the cumulative impact plot (CIP) to quantify cumulative impacts of renewable energy development within a region. Summed impacts of facilities are plotted as a function of the number of facilities, with facilities ranked by increasing (the best-case scenario) or decreasing (worst-case scenario) individual impact. These curves represent lower and upper bounds to which alternative development scenarios (e.g., facilities ranked by generating capacity) can be compared. We used CIPs to assess overlap of potential wind and hydropower facilities with two types of conservation area in the United States: (1) federally protected lands and (2) critical habitats of federally threatened and endangered species. Here, we evaluated two alternative scenarios: facilities ranked by (A) decreasing generating capacity and (B) increasing distance from urban centers. Differences between the best-case and worst-case scenarios were large, thus revealing opportunities to develop facilities with limited impact on conservation areas. Alternative scenarios maximizing energy density generally resulted in conservation area overlap intermediate to best-case and worst-case scenarios. CIPs can also identify the proportion of wind versus hydropower favored under alternative scenarios. Build-out scenarios aimed at minimizing conservation area overlap favor hydropower, whereas alternative scenarios favor wind power. We conclude that CIPs can (1) complement—but should not replace—project-level environmental impact assessment, (2) integrate strategic, cumulative, and scenario-based assessments, and (3) harness rapidly growing geospatial data.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

Optimization of battery swapping infrastructure for e-commerce drone delivery

Drone delivery is widely-researched to alter the current e-commerce delivery convention for providing short delivery lead times. Yet, flight range of drones, constrained by the available battery technology, sets a milestone toward realizing the sole-drone delivery. To tackle with the flight range limitation, locating automated battery swapping machines (ABSM) have been proposed and a few studies modeled the problem. Using the ABSMs, drones can be loaded with fully-charged batteries along the route to a demand location. Here, we introduce a mixed-integer nonlinear program to model the problem. The objective of the program is to optimally select ABSM locations, determine the delivery-mode choices (drone-only, truck-only, and mixed delivery) of demand locations, find drone delivery routes, and approximate the baseline requirements for the number of drones and batteries needed. The program minimizes the overall delivery system costs including: ABSM, delivery, drone ownership, battery inventory, and service congestion. A cutting-plane method is developed to find exact solutions in finite iterations. Computational experiments showed that the method quickly yields the optimal solution to instances with less than 60 ABSM candidates and 20 demand locations. A case study shows that the optimal drone delivery infrastructure can save almost 20% cost compared to the conventional truck-only delivery. Sensitivity analyses were conducted to reveal the impact of key parameters in the decision-making and found that a decrease in the ABSM and drone costs highly affect the system cost.

25 ENERGY STORAGE↗

ELSI — An open infrastructure for electronic structure solvers

Routine applications of electronic structure theory to molecules and periodic systems need to compute the electron density from given Hamiltonian and, in case of non-orthogonal basis sets, overlap matrices. System sizes can range from few to thousands or, in some examples, millions of atoms. Different discretization schemes (basis sets) and different system geometries (finite non-periodic vs. infinite periodic boundary conditions) yield matrices with different structures. The ELectronic Structure Infrastructure (ELSI) project provides an open-source software interface to facilitate the implementation and optimal use of high-performance solver libraries covering cubic scaling eigensolvers, linear scaling density-matrix-based algorithms, and other reduced scaling methods in between. In this paper, we present recent improvements and developments inside ELSI, mainly covering (1) new solvers connected to the interface, (2) matrix layout and communication adapted for parallel calculations of periodic and/or spin-polarized systems, (3) routines for density matrix extrapolation in geometry optimization and molecular dynamics calculations, and (4) general utilities such as parallel matrix I/O and JSON output. The ELSI interface has been integrated into four electronic structure code projects (DFTB+, DGDFT, FHI-aims, SIESTA), allowing us to rigorously benchmark the performance of the solvers on an equal footing. Based on results of a systematic set of large-scale benchmarks performed with Kohn–Sham density-functional theory and density-functional tight-binding theory, we identify factors that strongly affect the efficiency of the solvers, and propose a decision layer that assists with the solver selection process. As a result, we describe a reverse communication interface encoding matrix-free iterative solver strategies that are amenable, e.g., for use with planewave basis sets.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Climate and air pollution implications of potential energy infrastructure and policy measures in India

India is a rapidly developing economy with interrelated air quality, sustainable development, and climate change mitigation goals. There are unique challenges to achieving each of these goals as well as potential tradeoffs among them. This study examines the implications of possible future energy, climate, and air pollution control policies and measures in India through 2050. We take a scenario approach using the GCAM global energy-climate-land model combined with the Hector simple climate model and the TM5-FASST air quality source-receptor model to examine energy, climate and air quality outcomes. Reducing use of traditional biomass in buildings can reduce primary carbonaceous particulate emissions well below 2015 levels. However, policies that are more ambitious than current plans would likely be required to reduce SO 2 and NO x emissions well below 2015 levels. Among single policy cases considered, pricing of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and expansion of natural gas infrastructure have the largest impacts on overall energy system changes relative to the reference scenario. Ambitious air pollution control and GHG policies lead to the largest reductions in air pollution concentrations and radiative forcing, respectively. However, ambitious air pollution control and GHG policies differ in the extent to which they support or impede other policy objectives. Forcing increases due to reduced aerosols from ambitious air pollution policies can be mitigated, at least in part, by applying air pollution control and GHG policies together.

India↗

Community civic capacities for meaningful engagement in siting infrastructure for the energy transition

To address the driving forces of climate change and to ensure society has reliable and plentiful energy, considerable amounts of new energy infrastructure will need to be built in scores of communities over the near future. Democratic societies give communities considerable authority, influence, and autonomy on land-use decisions and regulatory policy making. Involving community members and stakeholders in decision making about facility siting and hosting is vital to minimize local opposition. But while there is much written about how to engage communities successfully, there is comparatively little attention given to understanding the civic capacities communities need to be able to participate. This paper reviews literatures on civic capacity and presents a new taxonomy based on six categories: leadership, knowledge, resources, civic engagement, social capital, and culture. It then proposes a systems framework to convey how capacities are developed and employed in collaborative decision making processes about siting and hosting energy facilities. Project sponsors, regulators, stakeholder groups, and communities can use these insights to better prepare and empower communities to participate as equal partners in conversations about energy facility siting.

12 MANAGEMENT OF RADIOACTIVE AND NON-RADIOACTIVE W↗

A general infrastructure for data-driven control design and implementation in tokamaks

A general infrastructure for tokamak controllers based on data-driven neural net models is presented. The paradigm allows for more flexible choices of both the underlying model and the desired controlled variables and targets. The system is implemented and tested on the DIII-D tokamak, enacting simultaneous pressure and temperature control via a finite-set model-predictive controller. Traditional control methods such as proportional–integral–derivative (PID) have proven effective for decoupled control tasks, but scale poorly when trying to achieve more complicated goals such as full state control. This is exactly where model-based controllers succeed.

70 PLASMA PHYSICS AND FUSION TECHNOLOGY↗