Search NASA⌕ Search

SEARCH · Search NASA

Results for “Energy Transitions”

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.

Quote a phrase for an exact phrase match. Source license links do not imply unrestricted reuse.

At least 91 records · Page 5
All sourcesNASA NTRSDOE OSTI
DOE OSTI2024

New Resource Adequacy Criteria for the Energy Transition: Modernizing Reliability Requirements

The transition toward a cleaner and more weather-dependent power system brings with it unprecedented challenges and opportunities for maintaining resource adequacy—namely, a future that includes rapid load growth, plant retirements, and a shift toward variable and energy-limited resources. Resource adequacy analyses, capacity accreditation, and the resource adequacy planning criteria are becoming increasingly important for power system planning and investment decisions. While previous ESIG reports evaluated the changing resource adequacy risks and planning practices created by the energy transition, none specifically examined potential changes to the resource adequacy criterion used for planning. The resource adequacy criterion sets the level of supply- and demand-side resources that are required for a given power system to meet reliability objectives. It is a pivotal standard that influences billions of dollars of investment decisions.

29 ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY↗
DOE OSTI2023

Power market models for the clean energy transition: State of the art and future research needs

As power systems around the world are rapidly evolving to achieve decarbonization objectives, it is crucial that power system planners and operators use appropriate models and tools to analyze and address the associated challenges. This paper provides a detailed overview of the properties of power market models in the context of the clean energy transition. We review common power market model methodologies, their readiness for low- and zero-carbon grids, and new power market trends. Based on the review, we suggest model improvements and new designs to increase modeling capabilities for future grids. The paper highlights key modeling concepts related to power system flexibility, with a particular focus on hydropower and energy storage, as well as the representation of grid services, price formation, temporal structure, and the importance of uncertainty. We find that a changing resource mix, market restructuring, and growing price uncertainty require more precise modeling techniques to adequately capture the new technology constraints and the dynamics of future power markets. In particular, models must adequately represent resource opportunity costs, multi-horizon flexibility, and energy storage capabilities across the full range of grid services. Moreover, at the system level, it is increasingly important to consider sub-hourly time resolution, enhanced uncertainty representation, and introduce co-optimization for dual market clearing of energy and grid services. Likewise, models should capture interdependencies between multiple energy carriers and demand sectors.

29 ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY↗
DOE OSTI2024

How Fisheries Biologists Can Facilitate the Clean Energy Transition

Abstract Fisheries and aquatic biologists play a critical role in creating environmentally protective hydropower flow requirements that govern flow timing, frequency, magnitude, and rate of change. Hydropower's role in the U.S. electrical grid is expected to evolve in response to increased wind and solar generation as hydropower will be called upon to quickly ramp up and down in response to changes in wind and solar generation. For this reason, hydropower is expected to have increased value as fossil generation is phased out, even as rapid flow fluctuations linked with hydropower flexibility may strand fish, alter habitat, and create unsafe recreational conditions. We face a new challenge in facilitating the renewable energy transition—designing environmental flow requirements that protect against the impacts of flow fluctuations while allowing adequate hydropower flexibility to support a stable grid. In this paper, we discuss hydropower environmental flow requirements, operational flexibility, and electrical grid stability, their potential interactions, and opportunities to align environmental and power system needs to support healthy ecosystems, multiple water uses, and decarbonization of the electric grid.

13 HYDRO ENERGY↗
DOE OSTI2023

Grand Challenges Revisited: Wind Energy Research Needs for a Global Energy Transition

Wind will be a foundational energy source in the electricity grid at the heart of a future integrated energy system, replacing traditional electricity generators powered by fossil fuels and providing grid reliability services in addition to energy. Future capabilities and functions of the wind energy sector will evolve apace with the future expansion and needs of global energy infrastructure; however, wind turbines designed today will not be able to provide the services needed to form and stabilize the grid as a majority supplier. In 2017, organizers for the IEA Wind Technical Experts Meeting (TEM) #89 Grand Vision for Wind Energy workshop assembled a group of experts to consider the question of how to enable a future in which wind energy supplies more than 50% of global electricity consumption. More than 70 experts representing 15 countries attended the workshop and provided diverse perspectives for the Grand Vision for Wind Energy. The IEA Wind TEM #109 was a subsequent gathering that was convened Feb. 28-March 1, 2023, in Boulder, Colorado, USA. The IEA Wind TEM #109 meeting aimed to bring together the leaders of all working groups and the IEA Wind Technology Collaboration Programme (TCP) to identify gaps in scientific knowledge, design, and deployment practice as well as identify recommendations for collaborative pathways, initiatives, and prioritized long-term research needs that can be addressed by IEA Wind. This report captures the outcomes of this meeting of international experts: five Grand Challenge areas (The Atmosphere, The Turbine, The Plant and Grid, Environmental Co-Design, and Social Science). In addition, meeting participants identified eight crosscutting topic areas that are discusses within this report (Environment-Turbine, Turbine-Atmosphere, Atmosphere-Grid/Plant, Grid/Plant-Turbine, Grid/Plant-Environment, Atmosphere-Environment, Turbine-Social, and Social-Grid/Plant).

17 WIND ENERGY↗
DOE OSTI2023

Scaling Wind Power Innovation Assessment for Rapid Energy Transition with Artificial Intelligence

Planning for energy system decarbonization requires new insights into the potential of renewable technologies, deployed at unprecedented scale, to meet urgent sustainability goals. However, limited scalability of current wind energy research tools restricts characterization of innovation impacts to isolated reference sites, challenging investment and decision making under rapid growth. We demonstrate the transformative potential of artificial intelligence (AI) to inform future technology advancement and energy systems design by leveraging a state-of-the-art surrogate model to conduct a series of fleet-wide wind plant layout optimizations for greater than 6,800 projected U.S. onshore buildout locations. We show how innovative wake steering technology can address an array of barriers to large-scale deployment and integration of wind power. Specifically, wake steering reduces required plant area by an average of 18% and could preserve upwards of 13,000 km2 for future greenfield deployment, potentially easing siting challenges associated with wind energy infrastructure. Further, by enabling reduced turbine spacing and increased energy production, flexible operations of wake steering improve levelized cost of energy, particularly for large plants and in land-constrained settings. Finally, optimizations that consider dynamic energy prices can deliver increased power production and revenue capture during high-value (often low-wind) periods, further bolstering plant economics. Our computationally efficient approach offers a pathway to accelerate nationwide geographic evaluation of innovative technologies.

graph neural networks↗
DOE OSTI2023

Place-Based Energy Transitions

To move from ambitions to actions, communities need in-depth energy-sector expertise and insight. As a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) research lab, NREL offers unbiased, best-in-class analysis and modeling capabilities supported by decades of scientific and applied research, expertise, and partnerships. This presentation highlights how NREL illuminates pathways to clean, affordable, equitable, secure, and resilient energy systems.

communities↗
DOE OSTI2023

Implementing Clean Energy Transitions for Small Communities: NREL Supports Sierra Club Florida in Efforts to Help Florida Communities Achieve 100% Renewable Energy

Sierra Club Florida's "Clean Energy for All" campaign helps communities in Florida transition to 100% clean energy. The organization sought the help of National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) analysts to achieve to achieve two goals: (1) create a Clean Energy Toolkit to help communities in Florida and across the country find data and and analysis to achieve clean energy goals, and (2) provide direct analysis of local clean energy potential for two Florida communities, the cities of Tallahassee and Sarasota.

clean energy toolkit↗
DOE OSTI2023

Energy Transitions Initiative Partnership Project: Wainwright, Alaska. Cohort 1 Technical Assistance: Assessment of Energy Efficiency, Renewable Energy, and Energy Storage Options

This project identified pathways to reduce energy consumption and enhance indoor environmental quality and resilience of a 1,500-square-foot former federal armory building owned by the tribe as it is renovated as a community multipurpose facility. The scope included thermal evaluation of multiple building efficiency measures, and a techno-economic exploration of an on-site renewable energy and integrated energy storage systems.

25 ENERGY STORAGE↗
DOE OSTI2024

Global Energy System Transitions

Energy systems power the world’s economies. They are pivotal to providing sustained economic prosperity that provides the goods and services that humans desire. Climate change is intimately linked with energy systems, because CO2 from fossil fuel use is the most important anthropogenic greenhouse gas emitted to the atmosphere, and cumulative anthropogenic emissions determine Earth’s concentration of CO2. Limiting climate change therefore means that global energy systems must reduce net CO2 emissions to zero and stabilize emissions of other GHGs. We compare energy system pathways as they are currently evolving with alternatives that have the potential to limit climate change over the 21st century. The differences are profound. Here we also discuss some frontier research issues that can provide a better understanding of potential pathways and their implications for decisions makers.

29 ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY↗
DOE OSTI2024

Distributional Equity in the Employment and Wage Impacts of Energy Transitions

We use restricted-access, geocoded data on the near-universe of workers in 23 US states to quantify the impact of wind energy development on local earnings and employment, by race, ethnicity, sex, and educational attainment. We find significant impacts that persist for several years beyond the project construction phase. Our estimates are larger than those from previous studies but still small relative to typical economic multipliers for fiscal spending or investment in other industries. We find the largest percentage increases for black workers and workers who either do not have a high school diploma or who have a college degree. We also find the economic gains for men to be much larger than those for women. Finally, we find estimates from data aggregated to the county level to be significantly lower than our worker-level estimates. We suggest a number of areas for further study building off the justice implications of our findings.

employment↗
DOE OSTI2021

Who is marginalized in energy justice? Amplifying community leader perspectives of energy transitions in Ghana

There is a divide in energy access studies, between technologically-focused modeling papers in engineering and economics, and energy justice frameworks and principles grounded in social sciences. Quantitative computational models are necessary when analyzing energy, and more specifically electricity, systems, as they are technologically-complex systems that can diverge from intuitive patterns. To assure energy justice, these models must be reflective of, and informative to, a wide range of stakeholders, including households and communities alongside utilities, governments, and others. Yet, moving from a qualitative understanding of preferences to quantitative modeling is challenging. In this perspective piece, we pilot the use of the value-focused thinking framework to inform stakeholder engagement. The result is a strategic objective hierarchy that highlights the tradeoffs and the social, economic and technological factors that need to be measured in models. We apply the process in Ghana, using a survey, stakeholder workshops, and follow-up interviews to uncover key tradeoffs and stakeholder-derived objectives. We discuss three key areas that have been rarely, if ever, well-represented in energy models: (1) the relationship between the dynamics of electricity end-use and the technology and economic structure of the system; (2) explicit tradeoffs between electricity access, cost, and reliability as defined by stakeholders; and (3) the definition of new objectives, such as minimizing hazards related to theft. We conclude that this model of engagement provides an opportunity to tie together rigorous qualitative analysis and stakeholder engagement with crucial quantitative models of the electricity system.

29 ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY↗
DOE OSTI2022

America's Strategy to Secure the Supply Chain for a Robust Clean Energy Transition

The opportunity for U.S. global leadership on clean energy is enormous. On February 24, 2021, President Biden issued Executive Order 14017, “America’s Supply Chains,” directing the Secretary of Energy to submit a supply chain strategy overview report for the Energy Sector Industrial Base (ESIB). This report lays out the myriad challenges and opportunities facing the energy supply chain along with key strategies to secure America’s position as a clean energy superpower in the years and decades to come.

29 ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY↗
DOE OSTI2022

Mental Models for Managing Grid Cybersecurity Risk - ARC Industry Forum, Cybersecurity and Energy Transition

A proper mental model of the concepts of cyber risk and its components of threat and exploitability and consequence is necessary to allocate limited resources to different security activities, especially when considered alongside reliability and regulatory and economic risks. Understanding the consequence and frequency different risks are realized also helps align the right mitigations to the right risks. Cyber-informed engineering (CIE) is an emerging method to “engineer out” cyber risk across product and system lifecycles, and INL has a portfolio of programs operationalizing CIE’s principles for the energy sector.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗
DOE OSTI2021

Decarbonizing via disparities: Problematizing the relationship between social identity and solar energy transitions in the United States

As solar adoption across the United States continues to grow, so do the gaps between rural and urban communities in how they choose to embrace these technologies, leading to serious questions of social justice and equity by researchers and policymakers alike. While recent studies have examined the racial and social justice elements of solar adoption alongside institutions' role in shaping pro-solar policies, codes, and code enforcement, an opportunity exists to discuss how the place and composition of the body politic in terms of race/ethnicity and rurality exists. This paper establishes a methodology for examining location and body politic composition concerning adopting all types of solar (residential, non-residential, utility-scale), utilizing the State of Georgia as a case study. Results indicate that the approach yields useful and informative findings; namely, there is a significant difference in adopting non-residential and utility-scale solar between rural and urban counties. We conclude by discussing further opportunities to expand on this analysis and the impact of assessing solar adoption in terms of value alignment between a body politic and the policies that shape the adoption of sustainable energy technologies. Finally, combining solar adoption information for the State of Georgia with Census data, this study compares solar adoption trends across counties--grouped by urban/rural classification and racial and ethnic majority.

14 SOLAR ENERGY↗
DOE OSTI2024

Nothing is Sustainable Without Energy Transition

Keynote and opening talk for NREL's 2nd PV Circularity Workshop. Will cover circularity concepts and how they can be tailored for photovoltaics, as well as some of the main research findings from the PV ICE team at NREL.

circularity↗
DOE OSTI2021

The Role of State Utility Regulators in a Just and Reasonable Energy Transition: Examining Regulatory Approaches to the Economic Impacts of Coal Retirements

The ongoing trend of coal retirements has disproportionately affected the socioeconomic health of communities where power plants are located. For many public utility commissions, these impacts have led to important questions around the scope of PUCs’ statutory authority to analyze, consider and mitigate losses to host communities within their role as utility regulators. Due largely to variations in state legislative charges, commissions have taken different approaches to articulating what lies within the public interest.This report examines the authority of PUCs across the country to consider non-energy economic impacts beyond direct ratepayer effects, and summarizes approaches that PUCs, utilities and other stakeholders have used to mitigate the economic fallout of coal retirements, specifically.

01 COAL, LIGNITE, AND PEAT↗