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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 73 records · Page 4
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
DOE OSTI2026

Wildfire-Power Grid Interactions: Feedback, Impacts, Monitoring, Modeling, and Mitigation Strategies

Wildfires are increasingly interacting with electric power systems through a two-way hazard chain: fires damage grid assets and trigger cascading outages, while grid faults can ignite new fires under hot, dry, and windy conditions. This review synthesizes the state of knowledge across five domains: (i) physical impacts of flames, heat, and smoke on lines, towers, insulators, and substations; (ii) power-infrastructure-initiated ignitions via conductor clash, high-impedance faults, and corona discharge; (iii) widespread blackouts and disproportionate societal impacts; (iv) multi-scale monitoring spanning laboratory tests, in-situ and grid-integrated sensors, and Earth observation; (v) coupled modeling that links fire behavior with grid operations; and (vi) technological and strategic mitigation pathways spanning prevention, response, and recovery. We integrate these domains into a novel 'feedback-aware' socio-technical framework. Through a longitudinal analysis (2005-2025) of global incidents, we identify that while vegetation contact remains the most frequent ignition source, aging infrastructure failure has emerged as a critical driver of catastrophic 'mega-fires'. We further identify persistent gaps, including limited interoperability of high-frequency grid and environmental data, scarce real-time data assimilation, and under-developed equity metrics for outage management. We conclude by outlining a research agenda to (1) deploy interoperable sensing architectures, (2) advance feedback-coupled fire-grid simulations, and (3) evaluate mitigation portfolios through techno-economic and fairness lenses. Recognizing wildfire-grid interactions as coupled socio-technical systems is essential for protecting infrastructure and communities and for ensuring reliable, sustainable electricity in a changing world.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗
NASA NTRS2023

The Compound Risk of Heat and COVID-19 in New York City: Riskscapes, Physical and Social Factors, and Interventions

Climate change is disrupting the fundamental conditions of human life and exacerbating existing inequity by placing further burdens on communities that are already vulnerable. Risk exposure varies by where people live and work. In this article, we examine the spatial overlap of the compound risks of COVID-19 and extreme heat in New York City. We assess the relationship between socio-demographic and natural, built and social environmental characteristics, and the spatial correspondence of COVID-19 daily case rates across three pandemic waves. We use these data to create a compound risk index combining heat, COVID-19, density and social vulnerability. Our findings demonstrate that the compound risk of COVID-19 and heat are public health and equity challenges. Heat and COVID-19 exposure are influenced by natural, built, and social environmental factors, including access to mitigation infrastructure. Socio-demographic characteristics are significant indicators of COVID-19 and heat exposure and of where compound vulnerability exists. Using GIS mapping, we illustrate how COVID-19 risk geographies change across the three waves of the pandemic and the particular impact of vaccinations before the onset of the third wave. We, then, use our compound risk index to assess heat interventions undertaken by the City, identify neighborhoods of both adequate and inadequate coverage and provide recommendations for future interventions.

COVID-19↗
DOE OSTI2021

A global assessment of policy tools to support climate adaptation

Governments, businesses, and civil society organizations have diverse policy tools to incentivize adaptation. Policy tools can shape the type and extent of adaptation, and therefore, function either as barriers or enablers for reducing risk and vulnerability. Using data from a systematic review of academic literature on global adaptation responses to climate change (n = 1549 peer-reviewed articles), we categorize the types of policy tools used to shape climate adaptation. We apply qualitative and quantitative analyses to assess the contexts where particular tools are used, along with equity implications for groups targeted by the tools, and the tools’ relationships with transformational adaptation indicators such as the depth, scope, and speed of adaptation. We find diverse types of tools documented across sectors and geographic regions. We also identify a mismatch between the tools that consider equity and those that yield more transformational adaptations. Direct regulations, plans, and capacity building are associated with higher depth and scope of adaptation (thus transformational adaptation), while economic instruments, information provisioning, and networks are not; the latter tools, however, are more likely to target marginalized groups in their design and implementation. We identify multiple research gaps, including a need to assess instrument mixes rather than single tools and to assess adaptations that result from policy implementation. Key policy insights Information-based approaches, networks, and economic instruments are the most frequently documented adaptation policy tools worldwide. Direct regulations, plans, and capacity building are associated with higher depth and scope of adaptation, and thus more transformational adaptation. Capacity building, economic instruments, networks, and information provisioning approaches are more likely to target specific marginalized groups and thus equity challenges. There are many regions and sectors where certain tools are not widely documented (e.g. regulations and plans in Africa and Asia), representing a key research gap.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗
NASA NTRSDate not supplied

Web-based Visualization and Analytics of Petascale Data: Equity as a Tide that Lifts All Boats

Scientists generate petabytes of data daily to help uncover environmental trends or behaviors that are hard to predict. For example, understanding climate simulations based on the long-term average of temperature, precipitation, and other environmental variables is essential to predicting and establishing root causes of future undesirable scenarios and assessing possible mitigation strategies. While supercomputer centers provide a powerful infrastructure for generating petabytes of simulation output, accessing and analyzing these datasets interactively remains challenging on multiple fronts. This paper presents an approach to managing, visualizing, and analyzing petabytes of data within a browser on equipment ranging from the top NASA supercomputer to commodity hardware like a laptop. Our novel data fabric abstraction layer allows user-friendly querying of scientific information while hid-ing the complexities of dealing with file systems or cloud services.We also optimize network utilization while streaming from petas-cale repositories through state-of-the-art progressive compression algorithms. Based on this abstraction, we provide customizable dashboards that can be accessed from any device with any inter-net connection, enabling interactive visual analysis of vast amounts of data to a wide range of users - from top scientists with access to leadership-class computing environments to undergraduate students of disadvantaged backgrounds from minority-serving institutions. We focus on NASA’s use of petascale climate datasets as an example of particular societal impact and, therefore, a case where achieving equity in science participation is critical. We validate our approach by improving the ability of climate scientists to visually explore their data via two fully interactive dashboards. We further validate our approach by deploying the dashboards and simplified training materials in the classroom at a minority-serving institution.These dashboards, released in simplified form to the general public, contribute significantly to a broader push to democratize the access and use of climate data.

Data visualization↗
DOE OSTI2024

Equity and modeling in sustainability science: Examples and opportunities throughout the process

Equity is core to sustainability, but current interventions to enhance sustainability often fall short in adequately addressing this linkage. Models are important tools for informing action, and their development and use present opportunities to center equity in process and outcomes. This Perspective highlights progress in integrating equity into systems modeling in sustainability science, as well as key challenges, tensions, and future directions. We present a conceptual framework for equity in systems modeling, focused on its distributional, procedural, and recognitional dimensions. We discuss examples of how modelers engage with these different dimensions throughout the modeling process and from across a range of modeling approaches and topics, including water resources, energy systems, air quality, and conservation. Synthesizing across these examples, we identify significant advances in enhancing procedural and recognitional equity by reframing models as tools to explore pluralism in worldviews and knowledge systems; enabling models to better represent distributional inequity through new computational techniques and data sources; investigating the dynamics that can drive inequities by linking different modeling approaches; and developing more nuanced metrics for assessing equity outcomes. We also identify important future directions, such as an increased focus on using models to identify pathways to transform underlying conditions that lead to inequities and move toward desired futures. By looking at examples across the diverse fields within sustainability science, we argue that there are valuable opportunities for mutual learning on how to use models more effectively as tools to support sustainable and equitable futures.

54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2026

Synthesizing land use and demographic change in Southeast Asia’s smaller urbanized areas from 2000–2015

The majority of the human population now reside in urban areas today. The United Nations estimates that nearly half of all urban dwellers currently live in cities smaller than 500 000 persons and the majority of future urban growth will take place in Asia and Africa, likely in these smaller urban areas, not mega cities. Thus, understanding the factors that influence urban demographic trajectories in small urban areas is critical to address sustainable and equitable policy initiatives related to food security, changing climate hazard exposure, and economic opportunities. Here we focus on Southeast Asia—a region historically characterized by lower urban population proportions, yet with a rapidly shifting dynamic demographic—to examine correlates of demographic change among smaller cities. We combine two open-source satellite-informed datasets: GHS urban center database (2015) and age-sex gridded data from WorldPop to calculate socio-demographic characteristics to model drivers of change in annualized urban population growth from 2000–2015 for 505 urbanized places. We find a general pattern of decreasing dependency ratios as city-size increases for most urban areas in Southeast Asia. Higher rates of growth and more variation is observed for smaller cities—those with fewer than 300 000 persons, the lowest population limit for UN data on urbanization. When examining covariates of urban population growth, we find significant statistical associations of population change in smaller urbanized areas with climatic, economic, and land cover/land use variables, but with country-specific variations. Characterizing a continuum of urban population development in the context of changing environmental, economic and climate conditions has been an important sustainable development and equity issue for decades, but newer analysis of city-level drivers allows for systematic inquiry thus moving beyond total population counts for policy-relevant insight.

Southeast Asia synthesis↗
NASA NTRS2023

Huntsville Urban Development II: Utilizing NASA Earth Observations to Map the Urban Heat Island and Evaluate Vulnerability in Huntsville, Alabama

Huntsville, Alabama has seen a boom in growth over recent years. One consequence of this urban expansion is the exacerbation of the Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect across the city. This project identified the areas within Huntsville the greatest potential for heat reduction and community health benefits from tree-planting efforts. The team created maps of land surface temperature (LST), the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), and the normalized difference built-up index (NDBI) over June through August from 2019 to 2022 using data from ECOsystem Spaceborne Thermal Radiometer Experiment on Space Station, Landsat 8 Operational Land Imager (OLI) and Thermal Infrared Sensor (TIRS), Landsat 9 OLI-2 and TIRS-2. The team identified areas with high LST, low NDVI, and high NDBI as areas with the greatest potential for heat reduction via tree-planting. Social factors relating to age, race, income, and self-reported health were adapted from Tree Equity Score to map community need for tree cover. When combining social with environmental factors, the team determined areas with the greatest potential for UHI mitigation: west-central and north downtown Huntsville. The team’s partner organization, the City of Huntsville, can use this priority map to guide their future tree-planting, and weigh the factors assessed according to their preference.

James Karroum↗
DOE OSTI2023

Accelerating Adoption of Energy-Efficient Technology with the Thermalize Model

The accelerating impacts of climate change destabilize food systems and ecosystems alongside the communities that rely on them. Thus, climate resilience is a health equity issue at both a physical (relating to biological impacts of pollution and environmental degradation) and a cultural level (loss of subsistence lifestyles, languages, etc). With roughly 20% of US energy-related greenhouse gas emissions stemming from heating, cooling, and powering households, accessible energy-efficient home retrofits are a critical element of climate change mitigation strategies. For communities already producing electricity from renewable sources, like Juneau, incentivizing ductless heat pump upgrades and energy efficiency retrofits provides an accessible pathway to transition households away from oil heating and drastically reduce emissions. Thermalize Juneau is a pilot program that will explore a repeatable framework for accelerating the adoption of energy-efficient technology in Alaska communities. This poster will describe Thermalize Juneau's goals and framework, progress through spring 2021, and future plans.

ductless heat pumps↗
DOE OSTI2023

Factors influencing mode choice of adults with travel-limiting disability

Introduction: Despite the plethora of research devoted to analyzing the impact of disability on travel behavior, not enough studies have investigated the varying impact of social and environmental factors on the mode choice of people with disabilities that restrict their ability to use transportation modes efficiently. This research gap can be addressed by investigating the factors influencing the mode choice behavior of people with travel-limiting disabilities, which can inform the development of accessible and sustainable transportation systems. Additionally, such studies can provide insights into the social and economic barriers faced by this population group, which can help policymakers to promote social inclusion and equity. Method: This study utilized a Random Parameters Logit model to identify the individual, trip, and environmental factors that influence mode selection among people with travel-limiting disabilities. Here, using the 2017 National Household Travel Survey data for New York State, which included information on respondents with travel-limiting disabilities, the analysis focused on a sample of 8,016 people. In addition, climate data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration were integrated as additional explanatory variables in the modeling process. Results: The results revealed that people with disabilities may be inclined to travel longer distances walking in the absence of suitable accommodation facilities for other transportation modes. Furthermore, people were less inclined to walk during summer and winter, indicating a need to consider weather conditions as a significant determinant of mode choice. Moreover, low-income people with disabilities were more likely to rely on public transport or walking. Conclusion: Based on this study’s findings, transportation agencies could design infrastructure and plan for future expansions that is more inclusive and accessible, thus catering to the mobility needs of people with travel-limiting disabilities.

99 GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS↗
DOE OSTI2022

Local Power: Comparing County-Level Renewable Energy Potential to Consumption Using the SLOPE Platform

Wide-scale deployment of renewable energy technologies has the potential to significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions and mitigate the effects of climate change. Many communities have ambitious clean energy goals with targets for locally generated renewable energy. To inform state and local clean energy planning, analysts from the Joint Institute for Strategic Energy Analysis (JISEA) and National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) used data from NREL's State and Local Planning for Energy (SLOPE) platform to compare annual technical generation potential of renewable energy technologies to modeled electricity consumption in every county of the contiguous United States. Annual costs were calculated to produce a 20% share of electricity consumed annually from each technology to examine localized cost effectiveness of a diversified mix of generation sources. For example, combining distributed and utility-scale wind and solar generation can offset the need for storage and nonintermittent fossil resources to achieve high deployment of renewables. This county-level analysis provides insight into where localized renewable energy generation could cost-effectively match annual electricity consumption.

29 ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY↗
DOE OSTI2023

LA100 Equity Strategies. Chapter 1: Justice as Recognition

The LA100 Equity Strategies project synthesizes community guidance with robust research, modeling, and analysis to identify strategy options that can increase equitable outcomes in Los Angeles' clean energy transition. Grounded in the analysis of past and ongoing energy inequities and engagement with underserved communities, the project presents community-guided and community-tailored strategies that aim to operationalize recognition and procedural justice. This chapter focuses on recognition justice, identifying and analyzing past and present social, cultural, and institutional barriers to affordable and clean energy for LA communities, as well as disparities in the distribution of energy system burdens and benefits. Acknowledging historical and structural factors behind current energy inequities is a first step in developing energy equity strategies for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) to achieve distributional justice - the just and equitable distribution of energy benefits and burdens in LA's energy transition. Recognition, procedural, and distributional justice are the three tenets of energy justice around which the LA100 Equity Strategies project is organized. In the United States, theory and practice around justice have historically focused on unequal distribution of environmental benefits and burdens. The historical siting of hazardous infrastructure such as power plants and transportation corridors in communities of color and low-income communities has disproportionately concentrated negative environmental impacts in their neighborhoods. Those inequities are reproduced via programs, policies, and other efforts (e.g., zoning and regulations, rebates and incentives, lending, investment, and financing) that directly affect people's lives and livelihoods. In recent decades, energy justice scholars and activists broadened their analysis to examine how environmental inequities intersect with other forms of social difference in the distribution of energy benefits and burdens. This approach investigates how differences in class, race, gender, age, and abilities, among others, intersect to understand the social, cultural, and institutional processes that create and perpetuate energy inequities. The LA100 Equity Strategies project embraces this approach to developing a more just clean energy future for LA. Because recognizing and understanding past and existing inequities is vital to addressing them in ways that ensure an equitable energy transition for all Angelenos, this chapter focuses on identifying and analyzing the challenges and inequities of LA's past and existing energy system, including LADWP programs.

community↗
DOE OSTI2022

Decarbonizing the Building Sector: A Human-Centered Study Focused on Small/Light Commercial Building Energy Equity

Decarbonization of the building sector is no small feat; buildings account for 40% of primary energy consumption, and fossil-fuel combustion in buildings leads to roughly 30% of total greenhouse gas emissions. Energy efficiency, electrification and smart technologies are fundamental strategies to reduce consumption and shift away from fossil-fuel use in buildings. This energy transition carries significant societal risks unless the shift is carried out with equity and justice as a top priority. Low-income, vulnerable and communities of color have higher energy burdens compared to affluent populations. Furthermore, systemic racism and historic exclusionary policies have resulted in increased risks (environmental, climatic, economic, and social) to low-income and communities of color, and underserved communities often do not have financial resources for, or access to, advanced building technologies. The U.S. Department of Energy is funding research to characterize and develop solutions to the challenges of equity and justice that complicate the ability of communities to contribute to goals for decarbonization. Our project has a specific focus on small commercial buildings and the businesses that occupy them. Significantly less is known about the burdens and risks these businesses experience or the challenges they face in pursuing decarbonization, or how those are affected by income and race, in comparison to research on energy equity and justice for diverse households. The project team includes the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Arizona State University and Clark Atlanta University. Researchers are conducting semi-structured interviews with small business owners in underserved communities in Phoenix and Atlanta, followed by a survey distributed to the larger community to learn more about the equity and justice issues that communities with different racial, economic, and cultural backgrounds face. Results will help inform an actionable and replicable framework for engaging small commercial building owners/operators to catalyze the reduction of energy burdens and increase equity.

Antonopoulos, Chrissi A.↗
DOE OSTI2024

Sustainable urban transformations based on integrated microgrid designs

The impacts of natural hazards on infrastructure, enhanced by climate change, are increasingly more severe emphasizing the necessity of resilient energy grids. Microgrids, tailored energy systems for specific neighbourhoods and districts, play a pivotal role in sustaining energy supply during main grid outages. These solutions not only mitigate economic losses and well-being disruptions against escalating hazards but also enhance city resilience in alignment with Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 11. However, disregarding socioeconomic factors in defining microgrid boundaries risks perpetuating inequalities and impeding progress towards other SDG 11 targets, including fair democratic participation. Our approach integrates social and technical indicators to bolster urban microgrid planning. Through a case study in a US county, we illustrate how integrated microgrid planning effectively intertwines urban resilience, well-being and equity while promoting sustainable development. This study underscores the importance of integrated microgrid planning for sustainable and resilient urban transformation amid environmental and societal challenges.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗
DOE OSTI2022

Community Engagement Frontier

This is the summary report of the Community Engagement Frontier for the Snowmass 2021 study of the future of particle physics. The report discusses a number of general issues of importance to the particle physics community, including (1) the relation of universities, national laboratories, and industry, (2) career paths for scientists engaged in particle physics, (3) diversity, equity, and inclusion, (4) physics education, (5) public education and outreach, (6) engagement with the government and public policy, and (7) the environmental and social impacts of particle physics.

72 PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS↗
DOE OSTI2022

Transforming Energy Through Sustainable Mobility: Expanding Low-Carbon Transportation R&D Solutions

As the nation's premier laboratory for cutting-edge transportation decarbonization research and development solutions, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) pioneers the creation and deployment of sustainable mobility technologies and strategies, with a focus on slashing transportation sector greenhouse gas emissions and combatting climate change. Trucks, planes, cargo ships, and other difficult-to-decarbonize vehicles are part of this essential transition for the transportation sector, which is currently the nation's largest source of the greenhouse gas emissions. NREL provides the scientific building blocks needed to spur innovation through multifaceted analysis, research, and engineering. This work acts as a catalyst to help industry bring affordable, high-performance, energy-efficient, and low-emission modes of transport and related infrastructure to market sooner. Our researchers collaborate closely with academic, government, and industry partners to design better batteries, drivetrains, and engines. They develop technologies for high-power charging, thermal management, energy storage, and power electronics. They are also reimagining fuels and combustion while creating sustainable lightweight materials. Unbiased expert guidance - backed by credible data and analysis, tools, and scientific rigor - empowers partners to make informed decisions about sustainable transportation. NREL recognizes that communities with limited mobility options face reduced access to employment opportunities, health care, and education, lowering overall quality of life. Alongside partners, NREL experts are creating transportation solutions that meet community-identified needs and increase mobility equity in historically underserved and overburdened communities. Rather than providing a one-size-fits-all solution, we take an interdisciplinary approach to mobility equity that considers the needs and challenges of diverse groups, maximizing benefits at the individual, community, and societal levels.

ADVANCED PROPULSION SYSTEMS↗
DOE OSTI2023

Practical Approaches to Embed Energy and Environmental Justice into DOE Technology Portfolios (August 2021–August 2024)

This document serves as a resource to science and technology offices within DOE seeking to incorporate energy and environmental justice (EEJ) into their programs and portfolios. It provides background information on EEJ principles, how those principles apply from early-stage technology development through deployment and commercialization. Through providing foundational information about justice and equity, and how they apply to technology development and program facilitation, this document provides information to take tangible and interim steps towards these goals.

29 ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY↗
DOE OSTI2022

Developing a Decision Support System for Regional Agricultural Nonpoint Salinity Pollution Management: Application to the San Joaquin River, California

Environmental problems and production losses associated with irrigated agriculture, such as salinity, degradation of receiving waters, such as rivers, and deep percolation of saline water to aquifers, highlight water-quality concerns that require a paradigm shift in resource-management policy. New tools are needed to assist environmental managers in developing sustainable solutions to these problems, given the nonpoint source nature of salt loads to surface water and groundwater from irrigated agriculture. Equity issues arise in distributing responsibility and costs to the generators of this source of pollution. This paper describes an alternative approach to salt regulation and control using the concept of “Real-Time Water Quality management”. The approach relies on a continually updateable WARMF (Watershed Analysis Risk Management Framework) forecasting model to provide daily estimates of salt load assimilative capacity in the San Joaquin River and assessments of compliance with salinity concentration objectives at key monitoring sites on the river. The results of the study showed that the policy combination of well-crafted river salinity objectives by the regulator and the application of an easy-to use and maintain decision support tool by stakeholders have succeeded in minimizing water quality (salinity) exceedances over a 20-year study period.

real-time management economics↗
DOE OSTI2024

Summary of a Workshop on Integrating Energy Equity into Power System Planning and Operation

On November 29 and 30, 2023, the Energy Systems Integration Group convened a one-and-a-half-day workshop in Arlington, Virginia, to improve knowledge and practices for integrating energy equity considerations into power system planning and operation. Workshop participants were invited to discuss approaches for integrating energy equity aspects into models and tools and to explore possible pathways for enhanced technical practices. Participants included utility planning and modeling practitioners, social science and energy justice academics, representatives from energy and environmental justice nongovernmental organizations, non-profits, consumer advocates, and representatives from the U.S. Department of Energy, national labs, and other government agencies. This report summarizes the discussion points and outcomes of the workshop, which prioritized the technical aspects of incorporating the challenges and solutions identified by electricity-futures stakeholders and communities. These technical activities include the fundamental grid structure and hardware, detailed modeling approaches that benchmark energy system performance and justify future investments, and engineering designs and limitations for potential solutions to meet energy equity goals in communities.

energy equity↗