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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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DOE OSTI2020

Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy Resources for State and Local Leaders

The Weatherization and Intergovernmental Programs Office (WIP) is part of DOE’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE) and supports DOE’s mission to create greater energy affordability, security, and resilience. WIP’s mission is to enable strategic investments in energy efficiency and renewable energy technologies using innovative practices across the United States in partnership with a wide range of stakeholders, including state and local organizations and community-based nonprofits. WIP supports DOE’s strategic objective to lower energy bills while expanding cost-effective energy choices for all Americans through the Weatherization Assistance Program (WAP) and State Energy Program (SEP). This resource guide highlights resources and publications from the State and Local Solution Center website and across EERE programs.

cost-effective energy, energy efficiency, tools an↗

DOE OSTI2020

Kentucky: Using LEAD Tool Data to Fund Energy Efficiency Programs

The Kentucky Office of Energy Policy (OEP) applied the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) web-based Low-Income Energy Affordability Data (LEAD) Tool to identify areas of their state with energy affordability needs. Kentucky OEP staff used the LEAD Tool to identify counties in Kentucky with the highest energy burden, which is the percentage of household income spent on energy. With this knowledge, Kentucky OEP staff allocated funds to relevant nonprofit organizations that provide home repairs, weatherization upgrades, and other solutions in areas where these services have the highest potential energy saving benefits and can reduce energy burden.

Low-Income Energy Affordability Data Tool, LEAD To↗

DOE OSTI2020

Large-Scale Solar Development: A Playbook for Southwest Virginia

his playbook is an introductory guide for local governments to facilitate large-scale solar projects in Southwest Virginia. In a region that has a long history of energy production, solar technologies offer enormous potential for economic development and job growth. Large-scale solar can take many forms, including rooftop or ground-mounted installations at local corporate offices, nonprofit organizations, or schools. It can also encompass utility-scale projects over many acres on former agricultural or timberlands, mined lands, or industrial sites. Regardless of the type of project, solar is a widely popular, cost-competitive energy choice that helps create sustainable and prosperous communities. This playbook is directed to municipal and county governments that have an essential role to play in encouraging large-scale solar projects. The first section provides an overview of state and national trends, including recent state legislation that will impact local oversight of solar development. This is followed by an overview of the solar project approval process from a developer’s perspective. The next section is an overview of the state and local permitting process for solar projects, followed by other development considerations such as local tax revenue options, financing incentives, and considerations for solar on brownfields and previously mined lands. The playbook concludes with a step-by-step guide for local governments to facilitate large-scale solar development.This playbook is part of the Solar Workgroup of Southwest Virginia’s effort to bring solar energy and associated jobs to the region. Over the past few years, the workgroup has met with stakeholder groups and crafted a strategy for local solar energy development. The workgroup has collaborated with cities and counties to bring SolSmart designation to eight counties and cities, implemented group purchase campaigns for commercial solar, and led research efforts.

14 SOLAR ENERGY↗

DOE OSTI2021

Stove Solutions: Improving Health, Safety, and the Environment in Darfur with Fuel-Efficient Cookstoves

Nearly three billion people across the globe cook every day using open, three-stone fires, or rudimentary stoves that burn biomass such as wood, agricultural waste, animal dung, and charcoal. Cooking with these traditional cookstoves is inefficient and grossly polluting, harming health and the environment, and contributing to global warming. In many places worldwide, women must walk for hours to collect firewood, risking their safety and sacrificing energy and time that could be used to earn a living. While often overlooked as a major contributor to the global burden of disease, cooking over open fires indoors is the largest environmental health risk in developing countries, and exposes women (and the young children near them) to amounts of smoke equivalent to burning 1,000 cigarettes inside the home. In Darfur, Sudan, where about 2.7 million people have been displaced from their homes by conflict, the situation is particularly dire. Each day, Darfuri women face the difficult choice between risking sexual assault during treks to collect firewood or selling a portion of their family’s meager food rations for cash to purchase wood. Here, the Berkeley-Darfur Stove, developed by scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) and volunteers from UC Berkeley and Engineers Without Borders, is a metal stove that reduces the need for firewood by more than half, owing to its improved combustion and heat transfer efficiencies. LBNL has partnered with a nonprofit organization, Potential Energy, and a number of aid organizations to disseminate more than 22,000 Berkeley-Darfur Stoves to Darfuri women. Several hundred thousand more are needed.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗

DOE OSTI2024

Raptor Monitoring and Minimization Technologies

In June 2023, the International Energy Agency Wind Task 34 - Working Together to Resolve the Environmental Effects of Wind Energy (WREN) - organized a forum to discuss monitoring and minimization strategies used to study raptor interactions with wind energy facilities. The forum included experts in raptor movement and behavior, minimization measures, technology validation, and wind energy development from four countries. The experts represented a range of international stakeholder groups including private industry, financial institutions, government agencies, nonprofit organizations, and wildlife consultants. This educational brief summarizes the discussion during the forum and written comments from additional participants who could not attend the live event. Relevant literature was used to provide additional context when needed.

minimization↗

DOE OSTI2024

Equity Considerations in Siting Consolidated Interim Storage Facilities for Commercial Spent Nuclear Fuel

Questions of equity and fairness are often raised by representatives from State, Tribal and local governments and members of the public when resolving conflicts over siting of nuclear facilities. However, the two terms are not synonymous: equity can be quantified while fairness is much more subjective. The Department of Energy's (DOE) December 2021 Request for Information sought input on how to site federal facilities for the temporary, consolidated storage of spent nuclear fuel (SNF) using a consent-based approach. It is anticipated that just such questions about equity and fairness associated with the potential emergence of more than one host site may be raised by the twelve groups of university, nonprofit and private sector partners (Consortia) working to support community engagement, inclusively involve stakeholders, build relationships, and develop innovative forms of mutual learning and public capacity to participate in the consent-based siting process for a federal consolidated interim storage facility during the current Planning & Capacity Building stage of the consent-based siting process. In terms of DOE's Integrated Waste Management System (IWMS), sociopolitical equity concepts are a factor in all aspects of IWMS development and operations and will be particularly applicable should two or more host sites become a possibility, either by the emergence of multiple volunteer hosts or by pursuit as a IWMS program strategy. This paper summarizes recent analyses that explore how four equity metrics - number of states, division of the projected SNF total by the year 2083, current population and land area - might be perceived by host communities, states and regions if two, three or four sites for hosting federal consolidated interim storage facilities were to be contemporaneously realized. Existing institutional arrangements, including Nuclear Regulatory Commission regions, Federal Energy Regulatory Commission regions and Low-Level Radioactive Waste Disposal Compacts, were selected to create hypothetically merged two, three and four-region scenarios to calculate how the four metrics balance out. Projected SNF burden was prioritized with regional contiguity of the consolidated regions a requirement for a functional scenario. The intent was not to promote or suggest any construct as a program objective; the configurations are geopolitical abstractions only to explore potential perceptions of equity. Understanding the possible issues of equity that could arise may benefit program efforts toward achieving a cooperative federalism wherein both the federal and multiple State governments share the goal of manifesting more than one federal consolidated interim storage facility. The main finding is that it is not possible to optimize for all four metrics simultaneously. The analyses demonstrate that trying to create a sense of equity by backfitting a solution to a random population and land distribution will always contain a degree of artificiality.

12 MANAGEMENT OF RADIOACTIVE AND NON-RADIOACTIVE W↗

DOE OSTI2025

Technology Partnerships: Fiscal Year 2024

The U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE's) National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) works with hundreds of partners within industry, government, academia, small business, international organizations, and nonprofits to advance clean energy. This fact sheet is a summary of our Fiscal Year (FY) 2024 technology partnership program performance.

agreements↗

DOE OSTI2026

Playa de Ponce's Advancements in Energy Affordability and Reliability

Un Nuevo Amanecer Inc. (UNA), a community-based nonprofit organization, partnered with the U.S. Department of Energy's Energy Technology Innovation Partnership Project (ETIPP) to develop a Strategic Energy Plan (SEP) for the community of Playa de Ponce on the southern coast of Puerto Rico. The SEP provides a community-driven roadmap to improve local energy systems by identifying shared priorities, strategies, and actions that support a more reliable, affordable, and resilient energy future. Over a seven-month period, researchers from the National Laboratory of the Rockies (NLR) worked with UNA, the Puerto Rico Hispanic Federation, community leaders, and residents to gather input through engagement workshops held in March and June 2025. These discussions helped define the community's energy vision and identify key challenges, including high electricity costs, unreliable service during extreme weather events, and risks to public health and safety - particularly for the community's aging population. This fact sheet summarizes the key elements of the Strategic Energy Plan, including four priority strategies organized around three focus areas identified by the community: energy reliability, safety and security, and stakeholder participation, education, and capacity building. Together, these strategies outline actionable pathways to strengthen Playa de Ponce's energy resilience and support long-term community goals. The plan serves as a shared reference for community members, local organizations, and government partners working to advance energy solutions in Playa de Ponce and complements broader municipal and island-wide planning efforts.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗

DOE OSTI2026

Playa de Ponce's Advancements in Energy Affordability and Reliability (Spanish Translation)

29 ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY↗

DOE OSTI2026

All Systems Go: Regional Collaborations for Scaling AEC Innovation: Preprint

The high and rising cost of preserving and delivering housing in the U.S. requires changes to existing practices of finance, design, and construction. Innovative methods such as industrialized construction could offer the means to address housing undersupply while reducing delivery costs, operational costs and material waste in the building industry, but they face challenges to success and to scale. Simultaneously, construction and cleantech innovators themselves face skepticism from the traditional entrepreneurial ecosystem such as incubators and accelerators while attempting to navigate systems level challenges. To respond to this need, various public and private sector stakeholders have launched initiatives to support innovative companies. These include nonprofits such as Terner Labs and Ivory Innovations offering curated programming to architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) startups; housing developers in Minnesota and California "bundling" multiple projects together to reach economies of scale with a consistent project team; public and private sector entities developing "catalogues" of pre-approved home designs in the U.S. and Canada. This exploratory paper documents several of these emerging ecosystem-development efforts to support innovative housing approaches, characterizing them by leading stakeholder and intervention strategy based on publicly available information. The paper finds that these initiatives share similar high level goals but vary in implementation, reflecting different stakeholder priorities, regional market and policy dynamics, and housing typologies. The early stage of these efforts offer limited data for comparing actual outcomes, but the paper highlights common qualitative themes and identifies opportunities for further research and potential coordination among these efforts.

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗

DOE OSTI2020

A Decision Support Tool for Distributed Solar and Storage Investments: A Case Study in Austin, TX

This study builds a decision support tool to evaluate when it is a good economic decision (least cost with minimum discomfort) for the residential customer to invest in distributed energy resources (DERs) based on different electricity rate structures, DER ownership frameworks, and DER rebates offered by electric utilities. Here, the tool is demonstrated using empirical electricity consumption data from Pecan Street Inc. (a non-profit entity based on Austin, Texas), residential rates from Austin Energy (the municipal electric utility in Austin, Texas), DER ownership costs from various nationwide pilot programs, and incentives offered by electric utilities in the United States. Results show that for constant electricity rates, the overall expenditure is least when the customer owns solar panels without storage, while for time-varying pricing structures, the least expensive scenario is one where the customer does not own any DERs. As the capital costs for DERs decline, utilities incentivize customer ownership of DERs, and more residential customers face the decision of whether to invest in DERs, this study aims to be a key tool in aiding that decision-making process.

14 SOLAR ENERGY↗