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DOE OSTI2023

Distributed Renewables for Arctic Energy: A Case Study

Alaska is a vast state that stretches into the Arctic Circle. Roughly 140,000 people in the state are dependent on isolated electric grids, traditionally burning expensive fossil fuels. This has negative impacts on air quality and climate. As the climate warms, fuel supply chains and traditional ways of life are threatened. Renewable electric sources offer a clean, resilient alternative with less volatile costs, but there are a variety of technical, social, economic, and political challenges to developing renewable energy systems in remote Arctic communities. Examples include harsh operating conditions, lack of local technical and managerial capacity, complex funding mechanisms, and glacial permitting processes. In this study, we interview one group of communities that are interested in adding renewable energy to their systems to understand the needs and challenges they face, and then another group that has successfully installed renewable energy, to understand how they overcame such challenges and the lessons they learned. Notable results include the importance of local buy-in, education, and technical involvement, procuring external funding sources, inter-community collaboration, installing bespoke systems, and working with reliable equipment suppliers. The goal of this report is to orient and inspire Arctic communities that want to begin their renewable transition, by providing helpful examples and points of contact.

17 WIND ENERGY↗

DOE OSTI2022

Geothermal Energy and Resilience in Arctic Countries

The eight Arctic countries - Iceland, Canada, Denmark (Greenland and the Faroe Islands) Norway, Sweden, Finland, Russia, and the United States (Alaska) - have diverse energy systems, but can be split into two distinct groups based on energy characteristics. The first group includes systems in Europe (Finland, Norway, Sweden, and Iceland), which are heavily grid-connected. The second group includes the United States (Alaska), Canada, Russia, and Greenland, which have grid-connected energy systems in their more densely populated southern regions, but are also defined by the prevalence of remote microgrids. Energy sources for heat and power vary across grid-connected communities in the Arctic nations. The primary energy source for remote communities, on the other hand, is almost exclusively diesel. This is true for both heat and power. Despite these and other key distinctions, Arctic countries share many commonalities with regard to their energy systems. One is a fundamental need for heat. Heat and electric energy are linked in most communities - remote, rural, and urban - and those linked systems are increasingly vulnerable to disruptions. Several of the Arctic countries use baseload renewable energy resources for heat and power. Iceland uses geothermal and hydroelectric; Canada, the United States, Sweden, Norway, and Finland use hydroelectric. Utilization of baseload renewable energy resources on-site for combined heat and power appears to enhance the resilience of communities in Arctic countries with high penetration of those resources. On the other hand, reliance on diesel by remote communities in other Arctic countries may be amplifying vulnerabilities. Although geothermal energy is currently used in all eight Arctic countries, resources are poorly mapped, and details can be difficult to come by. Despite this, geothermal energy provides heat and sometimes electricity at both utility scales and at the microgrid scale. Geothermal electricity is produced in Iceland, Russia, and the United States (Alaska). Direct use of geothermal heat is used in Iceland, Russia, United States, Canada, and Norway. Geo-exchange is used in Sweden, Finland, Norway, Canada, and the United States. In this paper, we reframe geothermal heat and power systems as integrated energy systems, asking the question: are integrated geothermal energy systems - where available and economic - resilient solutions for communities in Arctic countries? We identify resilience attributes of integrated geothermal energy systems, with a focus on microgrids and small-scale applications. Based on the high-level, qualitative analysis presented in this paper, the answer appears to be yes. Further work should prioritize refining our understanding of geothermal resources in Arctic countries, because development of the most economic geothermal resources in Arctic countries has the potential to enhance the energy resilience of its residents, whether in a grid-connected or remote off-grid context.

15 GEOTHERMAL ENERGY↗

DOE OSTI2024

Innovating the next generation of commercial smart building software

Nearly 30% of commercial building energy use is wasted due to equipment faults and HVAC controls problems. The result is increased emissions, compromised comfort and productivity, and less reliable coordination of building power needs with a clean grid. The energy impact alone represents $17 billion in potential savings. Today’s smart building software provides a robust solution to address these operational deficiencies. Energy management and information systems (EMIS) are saving up to 9% on average, with two-year paybacks. They are being incorporated into energy management processes, commissioning services, and utility programs. As effective as they are, two barriers prevent even deeper benefits; limited personnel to fix problems once they are identified, and the expense and time to manually implement changes in control systems. In partnership with the research community, the EMIS industry is developing new capabilities to overcome these barriers. Moving beyond siloed products for either fault detection and diagnostics, or optimal control, these new capabilities empower users to not only automatically identify faults, but also to push corrective action, and control improvements to their buildings. In this paper, several areas for enhancements are documented: ‘one-time’ correction of faults such as setpoints, schedules, and economizer lockouts; short-term active testing for automated proportional integral derivative (PID) loop tuning and functional testing; and continuous supervisory control for demand flexibility and year-round efficiency. Results are presented from a pair of partner implementations out of a dozen providers integrating these enhancements into their products, including field tests from across the country, and insights into operator acceptance and integration into operations and maintenance practices.

Casillas, Armando↗

DOE OSTI2026

Strategic Energy Plan, Town of Cranberry Isles

This report details the strategic energy plan for the Town of Cranberry Isles, Maine. This project was spearheaded by the Cranberry Isles Community Solar Association (CICSA), and supported by Island Institute and Sandia National Laboratories, in partnership with the National Laboratory of the Rockies and Versant Power. The plan details the energy vision, goals, and focus areas for the community, provides technical analysis of the current energy system, and outlines potential projects to support community energy. Throughout the energy planning process, the project team engaged with members of the community to gather input and ideas to shape the plan. The project team and Versant also completed an extensive data collection to better inform the project. Sandia National Laboratories completed baseline technical assessments and feasibility studies to better understand potential feasible options for future projects. These potential projects, high-level costs, and next steps are a key output of this report.

29 ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY↗

DOE OSTI2023

Modeling, Load Profile Validation, and Assessment of Solar-Rooftop Energy Potential for Low-and-Moderate-Income Communities in the Caribbean

This document presents the modeling of load profile consumption for Low-and-Moderate-Income (LMI) communities in the Caribbean Islands, as well as an assessment of the solar-rooftop energy potential. In this work, real data, together with synthetic and electricity bill data, were collected to validate and improve the load profile models. The solar-rooftop energy potential was obtained through a National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) software called the PVWatts calculator, and mathematical analysis. The analysis of rooftop solar energy potential was conducted to enable the minimum size of solar power systems to fit the energy demand in the community. The results obtained allow estimation of the capacity of the energy system for each house or an entire community.

14 SOLAR ENERGY↗

DOE OSTI2024

Utility-Scale Shared Energy Storage Deployment: Challenges, Research Gaps, and Opportunities

Although community energy storage (CES) and behind-the-meter (BTM) energy storage systems have been widely used to offer homeowners and communities a variety of localized benefits, their scalability and grid support functionalities are limited. On the other hand, utility-scale shared energy storage (USES) systems may offer a number of benefits for grid integration, scalability, and economic viability. When compared to BTM and CES alternatives, these large-scale systems provide more storage capacity, more efficient operations, and more economically viable options. The deployment of USES presents opportunities for optimizing grid performance, integrating renewable energy resources, and improving energy security at the community level. However, significant research gaps exist in optimizing the integration and operation of these systems, especially to allocate energy for consumer use, grid services, and enhancing energy resilience. This paper reviews the literature in this regard, focusing on the opportunities, research gaps, and challenges associated with USES deployment. Firstly, the paper provides an overview of USES systems and emphasizes their benefits. Secondly, the key challenges are identified, and research gaps associated with the operation and integration of these systems are highlighted. Lastly, some potential solutions and opportunities that can be adopted to facilitate the rapid deployment and management of USES are presented. Technological, economic, regulatory, and environmental aspects are also discussed in this paper, providing an overview of the current state and future prospects of this technology.

Gautam, Mukesh [BATTELLE (PACIFIC NW LAB)] (ORCID:↗

DOE OSTI2021

Integration of energy storage with diesel generation in remote communities

Highlights Battery energy storage may improve energy efficiency and reliability of hybrid energy systems composed by diesel and solar photovoltaic power generators serving isolated communities. In projects aiming update of power plants serving electrically isolated communities with redundant diesel generation, battery energy storage can improve overall economic performance of power supply system by reducing fuel usage, decreasing capital costs by replacing redundant diesel generation units, and increasing generator system life by shortening yearly runtime. Fast-acting battery energy storage systems with grid-forming inverters might have potential for improving drastically the reliability indices of isolated communities currently supplied by diesel generation. Abstract This paper will highlight unique challenges and opportunities with regard to energy storage utilization in remote, self-sustaining communities. The energy management of such areas has unique concerns. Diesel generation is often the go-to power source in these scenarios, but these systems are not devoid of issues. Without dedicated maintenance crews as in large, interconnected network areas, minor interruptions can be frequent and invasive not only for those who lose power, but also for those in the community that must then correct any faults. Although the immediate financial benefits are perhaps not readily apparent, energy storage could be used to address concerns related to reliability, automation, fuel supply concerns, generator degradation, solar utilization, and, yes, fuel costs to name a few. These ideas are shown through a case study of the Levelock Village of Alaska. Currently, the community is faced with high diesel prices and a difficult supply chain, which makes temporary loss of power very common and reductions in fuel consumption very impactful. This study will investigate the benefits that an energy storage system could bring to the overall system life, fuel costs, and reliability of the power supply. The variable efficiency of the generators, impact of startup/shutdown process, and low-load operation concerns are considered. The technological benefits of the combined system will be explored for various scenarios of future diesel prices and technology maintenance/replacement costs as well as for the avoidance of power interruptions that are so common in the community currently. Graphic abstract Discussion In several cases, energy storage can provide a means to promote energy equity by improving remote communities’ power supply reliability to levels closer to what the average urban consumer experiences at a reduced cost compared to transmission buildout. Furthermore, energy equity represents a hard-to-quantify benefit achieved by the integration of energy storage to isolated power systems of under-served communities, which suggests that the financial aspects of such projects should be questioned as the main performance criterion. To improve battery energy storage system valuation for diesel-based power systems, integration analysis must be holistic and go beyond fuel savings to capture every value stream possible.

25 ENERGY STORAGE↗

DOE OSTI2022

Planning decentralized urban renewable energy systems using algal cultivation for closed-loop and resilient communities

To tackle climate challenges, communities need to harvest renewable energy and resources on site locally to close the loops for enhancing the resilience of communities facing unpredictable and uncertain future changes. A decentralization planning of urban renewable energy systems is proposed by treating urban waste streams and producing biomass through applying algal biotechnology. When applying algal technology as a renewable and decentralized energy source in urban systems, the overall performance can vary by levels of urban nutrients, solar and CO 2 resources, and the transportation cost when considering its application to different urban densities, urban form, and the spatial scale of urban settings. This research explores three potential impacts on the algal system’s energy performance: (1) urban density, (2) urban form in different contexts, and (3) spatial scale. The research examines the impacts by testing urban settings given in actual contexts in Atlanta, Georgia, USA. Four neighborhoods representing the high-density urban, mid-density urban, mixed suburban, and typical suburban areas are investigated. The density-scale–performance relationships are explored through testing different urban forms of neighborhoods in both hypothetical and actual neighborhood settings. A GIS-based model is developed to estimate the overall energy performance of the decentralized renewable energy system in urban environments. Results show that the energy performance is positive mainly for high-density urban neighborhoods with small-to-medium scales, up to 0.36 MJ per ton of municipal solid wastes for actual settings and 0.37 MJ for hypothetical cases. Neighborhoods with higher density have higher energy performance while up scaling has negative effects on the energy performance with a low degree of significance. Optimal scales are found as a 1-km radius in real test beds and 1.3 km in hypothetical settings, in which the results show trade-offs between scaling effects in the system efficiency gain and the transportation cost increase.

Quan, Steven Jige↗

DOE OSTI2026

Stakeholder-guided holistic, Adaptive Framework for enhancing community Energy Resilience (SAFER) (Final Technical Report)

The Stakeholder-guided holistic, Adaptive Framework for enhancing community Energy Resilience (SAFER) project advances resilience science and engineering by addressing challenges in rural Kansas communities where aging infrastructure, extreme weather, and socioeconomic disparities heighten vulnerability to energy disruptions. Traditional approaches often focus on technical performance while overlooking community concerns and priorities. SAFER responds by integrating community perspectives with advanced analytical frameworks to create a holistic model for measuring and improving resilience. Project objectives included developing novel resilience metrics, advancing modeling frameworks that capture interdependencies across infrastructures, and embedding community-centric indicators directly into planning processes for distributed energy resources. The key technical innovations included the creation of self-organizing map (SOM)-based indices for objective resilience quantification, hetero-functional graph theory (HFGT) models linking power, water, transportation, and community assets, and graph neural network (GNN) tools for identifying critical nodes in complex systems. Community-centric energy planning was demonstrated through optimal siting and sizing of (photovoltaic) PV and battery storage, ensuring resilience enhancements also addressed energy burden and energy insecurity. SAFER engaged community partners in Dodge City and Ford County through surveys, focus groups, and workshops, generating more than 600 responses that established baseline measures of energy burden, financial insecurity, and willingness-to-pay to avoid outages. This data, organized in terms of a community capitals framework, informed the development of weighted reliability indices that better reflect community costs than traditional utility metrics. SAFER’s GNN-based critical node identification framework identified expert-labelled critical nodes with over 99% accuracy, while also uncovering additional functionalities essential for proactive resilience planning. The project’s models demonstrated that optimal PV and storage deployment could improve resilience indices by over 11 percent, with dispatch strategies further enhancing outcomes, confirming both the technical effectiveness and economic feasibility of these approaches. Through its combined emphasis on rigorous modeling, community-focused planning, and community engagement, SAFER advances the state of resilience research while delivering direct benefits to rural communities. The project provides tools, guidelines, and resilience heatmaps that help utilities, local governments, and residents better anticipate disruptions, prioritize investments, and strengthen the capacity to withstand and recover from energy-related hazards. Furthermore, the developed HFG and GNN frameworks are designed for transferability, allowing them to be adapted for resilience planning in other communities with minimal retraining. This inductive learning capability provides a scalable pathway to extend the SAFER project’s impact. Thus, creating a foundation for a nationally applicable model of infrastructure resilience. Additionally, the HFG can also be extended to include other FEMA community lifelines.

14 SOLAR ENERGY↗

DOE OSTI2020

Sizing Small-Scale Renewable Energy Systems for the Navajo Nation and Rural Communities

The Navajo Nation consists of about 55,000 residential homes spread across 27,000 square miles of trust land in the Southwest region of the United States. The Navajo Tribal Utility Authority (NTUA) reports that approximately 15,000 homes on the reservation do not have electricity due to the high costs of connecting rural homes located miles from utility distribution lines. In order to get these rural homeowners access electricity, NTUA and other Native owned companies are examining small-scale renewable energy systems to provide power for necessary usage such as lighting and refrigeration. The goal of this study is to evaluate the current renewable deployment efforts and provide additional considerations for photovoltaic (PV) systems that will optimize performance and improve efficiency to reduce costs. There are three case studies presented in different locations on the Navajo Nation with varying solar resource and energy load requirements. For each location, an assessment is completed that includes environmental parameters of the site- specific landscape and a system performance analysis of an off-grid residential PV system. The technical process, repeated for each location, demonstrates how the variance and uniqueness of each household can impact the system requirements after optimizations are applied. Therefore, the household variabilities and difference in locations must be considered. The differing results of each case study suggests additional analysis is needed for designing small-scale PV systems that takes a home-land-family specific approach to allow for better efficiency and more flexibility for future solar innovations to be considered for overall cost reductions.

14 SOLAR ENERGY↗

DOE OSTI2023

A Secure and Resilient Grid: Planning for All Hazards

This presentation is a condensed walk-through of the steps involved in NREL's Energy Resilience Assessment Methodology for those interested in adding resilience to their energy system. Risk assessment, community resilience options, and select NREL resilience-related tools are addressed.

energy security↗

DOE OSTI2022

Reviewing and Exploring the Qualitative Impacts That Different Market and Regulatory Measures Can Have on Encouraging Energy Communities Based on Their Organizational Structure

The emergence of energy communities represents a promising option to democratize the energy system by empowering consumers to take a more active role. This can aid in achieving energy and environmental goals as well as encouraging more equitable distribution of costs and revenues between all parties on the energy system. Despite this potential, energy communities are still a nascent solution, the success of which is heavily influenced by regulations. As a result, there are a wide variety of organizational structures for energy communities at this time. This paper provides a review of the policy landscape in Spain as it relates to energy communities. This work also presents a formalized method for characterizing different energy community structures and provides a qualitative assessment of the impacts of different measures to encourage energy communities with respect to their organizational structure. Findings suggest that many market-focused measures, including wholesale, local flexibility, capacity, and multisector market measures favor larger, more integrated communities, while regulatory, legal, and organizational measures, including peer-to-peer trading, aggregation, and self-consumption favor smaller, more distributed communities. Additionally, when developing policies to encourage the growth of energy communities, policymakers should be cognizant of the progression of policies in the context of the desired outcomes for energy community growth specific to the region or country and its goals.

29 ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY↗

DOE OSTI2024

A Decentralized Market Mechanism for Energy Communities under Operating Envelopes

Here, we propose an operating envelopes (OEs) aware energy community market mechanism that dynamically charges/rewards its members based on two-part pricing. The OEs are imposed exogenously by a regulated distribution system operator (DSO) on the energy community's revenue meter and is subject to a generalized net energy metering (NEM) tariff design. By formulating the interaction of the community operator and its members as a Stackelberg game, we show that the proposed two-part pricing achieves a Nash equilibrium and maximizes the community's social welfare in a decentralized fashion while ensuring that the community's operation abides by the OEs. The market mechanism conforms with the cost-causation principle and guarantees community members a surplus level no less than their maximum surplus when they autonomously face the DSO. The dynamic and uniform community price is a monotonically decreasing function of the community's aggregate renewable generation. We also analyze the impact of exogenous parameters such as NEM rates and OEs on the value of joining the community. Lastly, through numerical studies, we showcase the community's welfare, and pricing, and compare its members' surplus to customers under the DSO's regime.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗

DOE OSTI2023

AI-Driven Smart Community Control for Accelerating PV Adoption and Enhancing Grid Resilience

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has launched a Connected Communities program that supports projects that expand DOE's network of grid-interactive, efficient building communities nationwide. As an early pilot of Connected Communities, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and its partners have developed and demonstrated a community-scale, hierarchical control solution to address the potential grid issues arising from high penetration of solar photovoltaics (PV) as well as to improve grid reliability and resilience in this residential community. A field pilot study has been performed at an affordable housing development called the Basalt Vista Community, which was built for school teachers and other professionals in the local workforce and represents an autonomous energy grid with all-electric, energy-efficient homes. With no natural gas line in the community, this is the first all-electric net-zero community in rural Colorado. In the field pilot study, NREL has validated the performance of the hierarchical control solution, which consists of NREL's foresee home energy management systems (HEMS) and community aggregators, in increasing demand flexibility and self-consuming PV, reducing potential over-voltages, and supporting critical loads during emergency events. In this presentation, we will present the methodology, simulation and field pilot results, and lessons learned from the project.

all-electric community↗

DOE OSTI2024

Pathways and Insights from Community Solar: A Guide to Community Energy Storage Success

Community energy assets bring the benefits of renewables to all energy system stakeholders, not just those with sufficient capital, land ownership, and resources. As the price of energy storage continues to decline and energy equity and justice principles are incorporated into policies and planning activities, Community Energy Storage (CES) is poised to follow in the footsteps of Community Solar’s (CS) success. Though CES is in its early stages and faces many unique challenges, it is an invaluable tool on the pathway to decarbonization, with the potential to increase renewable access, energy affordability, resilience, energy independence, wealth creation, and community empowerment. This paper provides a brief review of the history of CS, comparing the market and regulatory advances of CS to the current state of CES. The lessons learned from the rise of CS are then adapted to support those working to increase CES adoption in pursuit of a more equitable and sustainable energy system for all.

community energy planning, community solar, commun↗

DOE OSTI2021

Valuation of Distributed Wind in an Isolated System

Remote communities are increasingly adopting renewable energy, such as wind, as they transition away from diesel energy generation. It is important to understand the benefits and costs of wind energy to isolated systems so that decision-makers can optimize their choices in these communities. There are few examples of valuation of wind energy as a distributed resource and numerous differences in valuation approaches, especially in the inclusion of environmental and economic impacts. We apply a distributed wind valuation framework to calculate the benefits and costs of wind in St. Mary’s, Alaska, to the local electric cooperative and to society, finding that the project does not have a favorable benefit-to-cost ratio unless societal benefits are included, in which case the benefit-to-cost ratio is nearly double. Government funding is important to reducing the initial capital expenditures of this wind project and will likely be the case for projects with similar characteristics. Additional fuel savings benefits are potentially possible for this project through technological additions such as energy storage and advanced controls.

17 WIND ENERGY↗

DOE OSTI2024

Unlocking the potential of biogas systems for energy production and climate solutions in rural communities

On-site conversion of organic waste into biogas to satisfy consumer energy demand has the potential to realize energy equality and mitigate climate change reliably. However, existing methods ignore either real-time full supply or methane escape when supply and demand are mismatched. Here, we show an improved design of community biogas production and distribution system to overcome these and achieve full co-benefits in developing economies. We take five existing systems as empirical examples. Mechanisms of synergistic adjusting out-of-step biogas flow rates on both the plant-side and user-side are defined to obtain consumption-to-production ratios of close to 1, such that biogas demand of rural inhabitants can be met. Furthermore, carbon mitigation and its viability under universal prevailing climates are illustrated. Coupled with manure management optimization, Chinese national deployment of the proposed system would contribute a 3.77% reduction towards meeting its global 1.5 °C target. Additionally, fulfilling others’ energy demands has considerable decarbonization potential.

09 BIOMASS FUELS↗

DOE OSTI2020

Leveraging Open-Source Tools for Collaborative Macro-energy System Modeling Efforts

The authors are founding team members of a new effort to develop an Open Energy Outlook for the United States. The effort aims to apply best practices of policy-focused energy system modeling, ensure transparency, build a networked community, and work toward a common purpose: examining possible US energy system futures to inform energy and climate policy efforts. Individual author biographies can be found on the project website: https://openenergyoutlook.org/.

29 ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY↗