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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 OSTI2025

Advanced Transmission Technologies –GETs and HPCs Session 3: HPCs and Building Actions Plans to Digital Assurance Risks

The third session of the Idaho National Laboratory’s (INL) Technical Assistance for Digital Assurance (TADA) program, held on November 11, 2025, centered on High Performance Conductors (HPCs) and the formulation of action plans to address digital assurance risks associated with Grid-Enhancing Technologies (GETs). This session convened experts from utilities, vendors, and government agencies to examine the technical, operational, and cybersecurity aspects of HPC deployment. Discussions highlighted the benefits of HPCs, such as their ability to rapidly increase transmission capacity using existing corridors, improve grid resilience, reduce system losses, and align with FERC Orders 2023 and 1920. Participants evaluated supply chain and digital assurance risks, including reliance on imported materials, limited domestic manufacturing capacity, workforce shortages, and traceability issues. The session also emphasized the importance of digital trust, integration-layer cybersecurity, and unified risk frameworks, introducing tools like intrusion detection systems, encryption, zero trust networking, and firmware integrity. Recaps of earlier workshops on Dynamic Line Ratings (DLRs), Advanced Power Flow Control (APFC), and Transmission Topology Optimization (TTO) underscored institutional barriers and integration challenges. Action plans were proposed to mitigate issues such as inconsistent cybersecurity practices, SBOM usage, supply chain visibility, operator trust, and misaligned incentives. Additionally, INL presented its supply chain risk management tools and Cyber-Informed Engineering (CIE) principles to support secure procurement and system design. The session concluded with a commitment to share key takeaways, incorporate cohort feedback into future policy development, and continue collaborative engagement through upcoming pilot activities. Session 3 of 3.

24 - POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗
DOE OSTI2026

Optimizing Transportation Networks for E-Waste Reverse Logistics: A Multi-Modal Cost Allocation and Pricing Strategy

The exponential growth of electronic waste (e-waste) poses critical challenges for sustainable reverse logistics and transportation network optimization. This study develops a dual-channel transportation framework for e-waste logistics that integrates dynamic freight pricing, cost allocation mechanisms, and game-theoretic coordination. The model captures interactions between centralized hubs and distributed processing networks, accounting for freight rate elasticity, volume allocation, and capacity constraints. Using Stackelberg game theory and cost-sharing strategies, the framework optimizes transportation efficiency and profit distribution across logistics channels. Numerical simulations show that the dual-channel structure increases centralized hub profit by 226.8% compared to baseline single-channel operations, while boosting total transported volume by 1.2% and nearly doubling freight collector profit under cost-sharing. Scenario analyses across regional infrastructures reveal that network density, policy incentives, and logistics costs shape routing efficiency and profit allocation. These findings suggest that coordinated strategies combining dynamic pricing, targeted infrastructure investment, and strategic cost allocation are needed to design efficient, resilient, and regionally adaptable e-waste transportation systems.

29 ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY↗
DOE OSTI2024

New Pathways for Equitable Solar Adoption in Texas

As part of the SEIN Round 3 program, a diverse group of energy stakeholders in Texas set out to develop and pilot new pathways to increase rooftop solar adoption at no upfront cost to lowincome households. One potentially promising pathway we identified involved combining funding from existing utility and federal programs promoting weatherization and energy efficiency. Our objective was to demonstrate pilot projects that equitably deployed rooftop solar to properties owned or rented by families in disadvantaged communities. Our goal was to create a clear path for lowincome households to achieve electricity bill relief and to access clean energy by leveraging existing utility energy efficiency programs with existing federal resources, such as the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP) and/or U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Weatherization Assistance Program (WAP) funding in Texas. This has been attempted in a few other states with varying degrees of success, but not yet in Texas.

14 SOLAR ENERGY↗
DOE OSTI2025

Analysis of the Financial Impacts of Building Performance Standard Penalties on Commercial Buildings in Aurora, Colorado

Buildings are responsible for 30% of total energy consumption worldwide. To address building energy, jurisdictions in the USA have enacted Building Performance Standards (BPS) legislation. The objective of BPS is to reduce energy consumption in buildings, thereby reducing the energy burden on utility infrastructure and other externalities. This is accomplished by setting mandatory energy use limits coupled with penalties for exceeding those limits. One of the key questions in BPS policymaking is how these penalties might impact the finances of building owners and tenants. This paper presents an analysis of BPS penalties in Aurora, Colorado, specifically targeting buildings impacted by the adopted statewide BPS legislation. Several BPS penalty structures were applied to the affected building stock in Aurora, and the potential impacts on building owner returns and tenant rents were estimated. The results show that for some combinations of building types and penalty structures, potential rent increases due to penalties could match or exceed typical yearly rent increases. The results also show that in most cases, for Aurora, there was no statistically significant difference in impact between buildings located in under-resourced and well-resourced areas.

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗
DOE OSTI2026

Climate-Driven Divergence in Biophysical and Economic Impacts of Agrivoltaics

Increasing global demands for food and energy necessitate innovative land-use solutions. Agrivoltaics, colocating solar photovoltaics with agriculture, shows promise, but its widespread adoption faces complex biophysical and economic trade-offs in a changing climate. Here, we develop an integrated biophysical-economic modeling framework to quantify how agrivoltaics affect biophysical and economic impacts across the Midwestern United States under both current and project climate conditions. We find strong regional divergences driven by climate gradients. In the humid eastern Midwest, solar panel shading limits photosynthesis, leading to reduced yields (maize -24%; soybean -16%) and lower farmers' profitability (maize -16%; soybean -2%) compared to conventional agriculture. Conversely, in the semiarid western region, shading alleviates heat and water stress, moderating yield reductions for maize (-12%) and even boosting soybean yields (+6%), resulting in improved economic returns (-6% for maize; +9% for soybean), for a scenario with 33% photovoltaic ground coverage ratio. Although agrivoltaics generate substantial electrical energy across all regions, high upfront installation costs challenge solar developers compared to standalone solar photovoltaics. However, our analysis identifies “win-win” opportunities where soybean-based agrivoltaics in the semiarid region produce economic benefits for both farmers and solar developers, highlighting the necessity for region-specific designs tailored to local climate conditions. Critically, future climate projections indicate eastward expansion of semiarid conditions, broadening areas where agrivoltaics can mitigate crop yield penalties (even boosting yield) and improve overall profitability, especially under high-emission scenarios. The results provide a mechanistic and economically integrated understanding essential for developing evidence-based and region-specific strategies to scale agrivoltaics in a changing climate.

14 SOLAR ENERGY↗
DOE OSTI2025

Fair Concurrent Training of Multiple Models in Federated Learning

Federated learning (FL) enables collaborative learning across multiple clients. In most FL work, all clients train a single learning task. However, the recent proliferation of FL applications may increasingly require multiple FL tasks to be trained simultaneously, sharing clients’ computing resources, which we call Multiple-Model Federated Learning (MMFL). Current MMFL algorithms use naïve average-based client-task allocation schemes that often lead to unfair performance when FL tasks have heterogeneous difficulty levels, as the more difficult tasks may need more client participation to train effectively. Furthermore, in the MMFL setting, we face a further challenge that some clients may prefer training specific tasks to others, and may not even be willing to train other tasks, e.g., due to high computational costs, which may exacerbate unfairness in training outcomes across tasks. We address both challenges by firstly designing FedFairMMFL, a difficulty-aware algorithm that dynamically allocates clients to tasks in each training round, based on the tasks’ current performance levels. We provide guarantees on the resulting task fairness and FedFairMMFL’s convergence rate. We then propose novel auction designs that incentivizes clients to train multiple tasks, so as to fairly distribute clients’ training efforts across the tasks, and extend our convergence guarantees to this setting. Here, we finally evaluate our algorithm with multiple sets of learning tasks on real world datasets, showing that our algorithm improves fairness by improving the final model accuracy and convergence speed of the worst performing tasks, while maintaining the average accuracy across tasks.

Federated learning↗
DOE OSTI2025

Data and Code for 'GHG Mitigation and Land Use Change Implications of Sustainable Aviation Fuel in the United States'

BEPAM, Biofuel and Environmental Policy Analysis Model, models the agricultural sector and determines economically optimal land-use and feedstock mix at the US scale by maximizing the sum of agricultural sector consumers’ and producers’ surplus subject to various resource balances, land availability, and technological constraints under a range of biomass prices, from zero to $140 Mg-1 over the 2016-2030 period. Here BEPAM is used to model SAF production using energy crops and crop residues. BEPAM uses the GAMS format and uses yield and GHG balance projections from the biogeochemical model, DayCent.

09 BIOMASS FUELS↗
DOE OSTI2020

Model Year 2019 Fuel Economy Guide: EPA Fuel Economy Estimates

The Fuel Economy Guide is published by the U.S. Department of Energy as an aid to consumers considering the purchase of a new vehicle. The Guide lists estimates of miles per gallon (mpg) for each vehicle available for the new model year. These estimates are provided by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in compliance with Federal Law. By using this Guide, consumers can estimate the average yearly fuel cost for any vehicle. The Guide is intended to help consumers compare the fuel economy of similarly sized cars, light duty trucks and special purpose vehicles.

33 ADVANCED PROPULSION SYSTEMS↗
DOE OSTI2020

Model Year 2020 Fuel Economy Guide: EPA Fuel Economy Estimates

The Fuel Economy Guide is published by the U.S. Department of Energy as an aid to consumers considering the purchase of a new vehicle. The Guide lists estimates of miles per gallon (mpg) for each vehicle available for the new model year. These estimates are provided by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in compliance with Federal Law. By using this Guide, consumers can estimate the average yearly fuel cost for any vehicle. The Guide is intended to help consumers compare the fuel economy of similarly sized cars, light duty trucks and special purpose vehicles.

33 ADVANCED PROPULSION SYSTEMS↗
DOE OSTI2020

Minnesota Solar Pathways: Illuminating Pathways to 10% Solar (Final Technical Report)

The Minnesota Solar Pathways project, funded in part by the Department of Energy’s Solar Energy Technologies Office, was a three-year project designed to explore least-risk, best-value strategies for meeting the State of Minnesota’s solar goals. As part of this aim, the Pathways Team modeled renewable generation costs, examined ways to streamline interconnection, and evaluated technologies that can increase solar hosting capacity on the distribution grid. Midway through the project period, the Pathways Team expanded the scope of study using the same modeling framework from the Minnesota Solar Potential Analysis to estimate and compare generation costs for high renewables penetration scenarios across the Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO) region. The analysis concludes that it can be cheaper to overbuild solar + wind and curtail surplus than to store all generation. In addition, the analysis of individual MISO subregions compared with the whole region highlights the opportunities of enabling market potential compared with impact of ongoing transmission constraints. Beyond the analysis of future scenarios, the partnerships initiated and supported through this project underscored the ongoing need for work with stakeholders to address key issues, particularly around siting, and leverage symbiotic strategies to meet state goals.

14 SOLAR ENERGY↗
DOE OSTI2020

Automatic Fault Detection & Diagnostics: Residential Market Analysis

This report provides an overview of the market potential for automated fault detection and diagnostics (AFDD) in the residential sector, focusing on embedded AFDD in central air conditioners (CAC) and air-source heat pumps (ASHP) as well as the use of smart diagnostic tools to ensure quality installation of CAC/ASHP equipment. The contents include background on AFDD, stakeholder engagement efforts, a technology assessment of AFDD and smart diagnostic tools, residential CAC and ASHP market trends, a characterization of the CAC and ASHP installed base, a synopsis of utility provider programs, and market barriers.

29 ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY↗
DOE OSTI2021

Industrial Conveyor Motor Performance Evaluation

The purpose of this project is to estimate the energy savings potential from a switched-reluctance motor (SRM) compared to an induction motor equipped with variable frequency drive (VFD) in a straight belt conveyor application. To experimentally evaluate savings in a realistic scenario, a baseline motor and VFD were selected from one of ComEd’s manufacturing customers’ conveyor systems. It was desired to not only estimate savings in the selected conveyor system, but to evaluate potential savings from using the SRM in any straight belt conveyor. Therefore, NREL developed a conveyor system energy calculation tool to supplement the experimental results of this assessment.

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗
DOE OSTI2022

Model Year 2021 Fuel Economy Guide

The Fuel Economy Guide is published by the U.S. Department of Energy as an aid to consumers considering the purchase of a new vehicle. The Guide lists estimates of miles per gallon (mpg) for each vehicle available for the new model year. These estimates are provided by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in compliance with Federal Law. By using this Guide, consumers can estimate the average yearly fuel cost for any vehicle. The Guide is intended to help consumers compare the fuel economy of similarly sized cars, light duty trucks and special purpose vehicles.

2017 EPA fuel economy↗
DOE OSTI2022

Decarbonization Considerations: Grid-Interactive Efficient Buildings [Slides]

The Federal Energy Management Program (FEMP) is helping federal agencies understand how to meet decarbonization goals with grid interactive efficient buildings (GEB). This training will provide attendees with an introduction to GEB, how to work with utilities, and opportunities for federal sites.

22 GENERAL STUDIES OF NUCLEAR REACTORS↗
DOE OSTI2024

Hydropower Investment and Public-Private Ecosystem Assessment

The U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE's) Water Power Technologies Office (WPTO) commissioned this Report to evaluate the primary challenges in raising investment in medium-sized hydropower and PSH, defined as projects with five (5) to 30 megawatts (MW) of installed capacity, and to understand potential opportunities to increase mobilization of private sector investment in hydropower and PSH projects in the future. Based on stakeholder interviews, a market survey, and industry reports, this Report considers the investment and development trends and future opportunities for five hydropower project types: capacity additions, conduits, PSH (both open and closed loop), non-powered dams (NPDs), and new stream-reach development (NSD).

13 HYDRO ENERGY↗
DOE OSTI2020

Distributed Generation Market Demand (dGen) model

The Distributed Generation Market Demand (dGen) model simulates customer adoption of distributed energy resources (DERs) for residential, commercial, and industrial entities in the United States or other countries through 2050. The dGen model can be used for identifying the sectors, locations, and customers for whom adopting DERs would have a high economic value, for generating forecasts as an input to estimate distribution hosting capacity analysis, integrated resource planning, and load forecasting, and for understanding the economic or policy conditions in which DER adoption becomes viable, and for illustrating sensitivity to market and policy changes such as retail electricity rate structures, net energy metering, and technology costs.

Array↗