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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 OSTI2023

Solarize Fairbanks BRITE: Facilitating Efficient, Resilient Homes in Cold Climates

Solarize Fairbanks began an annual Solarize campaign in the Interior Alaska city in 2020, located in IECC climate zone 8, with a goal to increase the number of solar PV panels in the community. The campaign provides peer support, education, bulk purchase discounts, and simplified installation of solar PV technologies for homes, businesses, and nonprofits. In 2021, the campaign began offering energy audits to building and homeowners with a bulk discount; however, building owners were responsible for pursuing next steps on their own. In 2022, a diverse team of local, state, and federal partners formed a team to create a process to further facilitate energy efficiency improvements alongside solar PV technology. The resulting project, Solarize Fairbanks - Building Resilience for the Interior (BRITE) aims to build out an efficiency component over 3 years. If implemented, it will be the first efficiency add-on to a solarize campaign in Alaska. In year one, the team conducted energy audits of four nonprofits located in the cold climate of Interior Alaska and is providing technical assistance and fundraising for the nonprofits to pursue the recommended retrofits. These audits provided insights on the types of retrofits that could be expected to increase efficiency, comfort, and resiliency of buildings, including LED lighting retrofits, increased envelope insulation, improved building controls, and air source heat pump technology. A pre- and post-retrofit analysis will provide further insight on the energy savings and other benefits of the retrofits. It will also inform the offerings in the following years of the BRITE add-on to Solarize campaigns. In this presentation, program implementers will review the past campaigns of Solarize Fairbanks, summarize the energy efficiency and resiliency analyses of the nonprofit buildings, cover future plans for Solarize Fairbanks BRITE, and provide recommendations for other communities pursuing similar programs.

Alaska↗
DOE OSTI2022

Energy Storage Valuation: A Review of Use Cases and Modeling Tools

An enticing prospect that drives adoption of energy storage systems (ESS) is its ability to be used in a diverse set of use cases and the potential to take advantage of multiple unique value streams. The Energy Storage Grand Challenge (ESGC) technology development pathways for storage technologies draw from a set of use cases in the electrical power system, each with their own specific cost and performance needs. In addition to the need for cost and performance improvements for storage technologies, there a need for robust valuation methods to enable effective policy, investment, business models, and resource planning. There are numerous storage valuation tools available to the public, many of which can analyze the value of an ESS project with inputs and characteristics that reflect a specific storage use case. To effectively reach ESS stakeholders that may be interested in learning about valuation models, this report will draw from publicly available tools developed by the Department of Energy (DOE) and frame their functionalities and capabilities within the context of three distinct use case families. This report examines three of the ESGC use case families in depth and provides a methodology in which interested stakeholders can determine which DOE modeling tool is best suited to value ESS for their specific case. The high-level objectives for this report include: (1) Provide specific sub use-cases for each use case family for further characterization; (2) Provide technical parameters and relevant data for three example use cases that could be used in a valuation tool; (3) Identify a list of publicly available DOE tools that can provide energy storage valuation insights for ESS use case stakeholders; (4) Provide information on the capabilities and different options in each modeling tool; (5) Make conclusions on which are best suited for valuing certain functional/performance requirements and which tools might be applicable to other use cases; and (6) Show the methodology that informs a Model Selection Platform (MSP) framework that educates stakeholders on different DOE models and provides a streamlined way to choose the right model that most closely matches their needs.

25 ENERGY STORAGE↗
DOE OSTI2022

1.4.2.403 - Water Power STEM Workforce Development (Hydro)

As interest in renewable energy grows, water power technologies will continue to play a robust and growing role. However, the industry needs new talent to spur innovation and to support industry needs. With one-quarter of the domestic hydropower workforce retiring in the coming decade, the need to fill the workforce pipeline has never been more critical. The lack of new hydropower development has limited the number of educational programs focused on this sector at all levels of education. NREL has a long track record of working to address educational needs across the renewable energy spectrum. Leveraging this track record, this project brought the Hydropower STEM Portal to water power stakeholders fueled by information from a multitude of sectors, our partnership with the Hydropower Foundation, NEED, and others. The team has also sought to integrate activities with the Bonneville Environmental Foundation, to increase dissemination opportunities and interfaces. The purpose of the portal is to be a one-stop shop to information geared at inspiring the next-generation water power professional. NREL also leverages experience in engaging with stakeholders to understand barriers to technology adoption to identify issues and drivers, provide feedback to the R&D community, work to clarify misperceptions, and inform decisions to facilitate market adoption. The outcome of this work is a more successful and diverse water power industry based on a motivated and better-trained workforce.

ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY,HYDRO ENERGY↗
DOE OSTI2020

Solar Resource and Infrastructure Assessment for the Town of Westhampton

This report is a solar resource and infrastructure assessment for the town of Westhampton, Massachusetts. The assessment was funded through the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Solar Energy Innovation Network (NREL SEIN) Solar in Rural Communities Program, as part of a project to develop a Community-Informed Proactive Solar Siting and Financing Model. As a first step, the project lead organization, UMass Clean Energy Extension prepared an assessment of existing infrastructure, resources, and potential solar development opportunities in participating municipalities, including Westhampton. This assessment was designed to describe relevant bylaws and infrastructure within the town, identify the types of solar facilities that could be developed, and quantify the total space available for each type of facility. In this report, we reviewed existing electricity grid infrastructure, and the potential to interconnect additional solar facilities. At the present time, both distribution lines providing electricity to Westhampton are oversaturated with authorized and proposed solar projects, and cannot accommodate additional solar projects to interconnect to the grid. Future upgrades could potentially free up additional capacity for new, large projects. Meanwhile, most three-phase lines could likely accommodate additional small-to-medium scale projects (under 200 kW), and most single-phase lines could likely accommodate additional projects under 50 kW in size. This description represents the local grid infrastructure as it is - planning for future scenarios of development could include recommendations for areas of grid infrastructure improvement to allow siting of distributed generation in locations preferred by the community. Future scenarios may also include the addition energy storage and other "non-wires alternatives."

14 SOLAR ENERGY↗
DOE OSTI2022

Health Physics Research Reactor Criticality Accident Alarm System Benchmark Overview

From the countless critical experiments performed in the world during the past century, high-quality integral benchmarks experiments have been collected and gathered into the International Handbook of Evaluated Criticality Safety Benchmark Experiments (ICSBEP Handbook), managed by the International Criticality Safety Benchmark Evaluation Project (ICSBEP) Working Group. This information preservation and dissemination effort is crucial for reactor licensing as well as criticality and radiation transport modeling validation. This summary reports on the status of a tentative benchmark addition to the ICSBEP Handbook. The proposed benchmark arises from legacy operation data of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) Health Physics Research Reactor (HPRR). The HPRR was a small, unmoderated, unshielded fast burst reactor that was used for research in health physics and radiobiology as well as teaching and training. As part of a comprehensive investigation of the available HPRR operation data and characteristics, different possibilities for use of the valuable results were studied. A critical experiment benchmark evaluation was performed, analyzing data coming from sub-critical and critical operation of the HPRR during operator training, steady-state irradiation of samples and before critical bursts. The results of the evaluation do not satisfy for the ICSBEP standards as the benchmark relative standard uncertainty is of about 4% for k eff , and the relative difference between sample calculations and expected k eff results is of about 1.5%. Due to those unsatisfactory results, it was decided not to pursue critical experiments evaluation of the HPRR presently and to focus instead on shielding type data for the creation of a criticality accident alarm system (CAAS) and shielding category benchmark, which is currently very scarce in the ICSBEP handbook—especially concerning critical, pulsed assembly, or reactor operation data. Several dosimetry and shielding experiments from HPRR burst operation were evaluated, with different benchmark metrics as sulfur fluence, Element 57 dose, or neutron fluence at different distances and under different shield materials conditions. An evaluation focusing on the Element 57 neutron dose as a benchmark metric was submitted to the ICSBEP Technical Review Group (TRG) meeting in October 2021, and the inclusion of the evaluation in the ICSBEP Handbook was deferred. The main change proposed by the international experiment evaluation experts is to use the neutron fluence measured by Bonner spheres as a benchmark metric. This represents a quantity closer to that actually measured by the experimentalists of the HPRR compared to the Element 57 dose, which adds another step of data transformation, thus potentially adding uncertainty to the benchmark. The evaluation has been updated and will be submitted to the 2022 ICSBEP TRG meeting for inclusion in the 2023 edition of the ICSBEP Handbook. The evaluation is performed using the KENO and MAVRIC combination from the SCALE 6.2.4 code suite which was previously used in similar CAAS benchmarks to allow for the use of variance reduction techniques.

61 RADIATION PROTECTION AND DOSIMETRY↗
DOE OSTI2020

Solar Resource and Infrastructure Assessment for the Town of Wendell

This report is a solar resource and infrastructure assessment for the town of Wendell, Massachusetts. The assessment was funded through the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Solar Energy Innovation Network (NREL SEIN) Solar in Rural Communities Program, as part of a project to develop a Community-Informed Proactive Solar Siting and Financing Model. As a first step, the project lead organization, UMass Clean Energy Extension prepared an assessment of existing infrastructure, resources, and potential solar development opportunities in participating municipalities, including Wendell. This assessment was designed to describe relevant bylaws and infrastructure within the town, identify the types of solar facilities that could be developed, and quantify the total space available for each type of facility. In this report, we reviewed existing electricity grid infrastructure, and the potential to interconnect additional solar facilities. At the present time, both distribution lines providing electricity to Wendell are over-saturated with authorized and proposed solar projects, and cannot accommodate additional solar projects to interconnect to the grid. It appears that National Grid is planning an upgrade to the Wendell Depot substation, which might then allow in-process projects are to proceed, and potentially free up additional capacity for new, large projects. Meanwhile, most three-phase lines could likely accommodate additional small-to-medium scale projects (under 200 kW), and most single-phase lines could likely accommodate additional projects under 50 kW in size. This description represents the local grid infrastructure as it is - planning for future scenarios of development could include recommendations for areas of grid infrastructure improvement to allow siting of distributed generation in locations preferred by the community. Future scenarios may also include the addition energy storage and other "non-wires alternatives."

14 SOLAR ENERGY↗
DOE OSTI2020

Solar Resource and Infrastructure Assessment for the Town of Blandford

This report is a solar resource and infrastructure assessment for the town of Blandford, Massachusetts. The assessment was funded through the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Solar Energy Innovation Network (NREL SEIN) Solar in Rural Communities Program, as part of a project to develop a Community-Informed Proactive Solar Siting and Financing Model. As a first step, the project lead organization, UMass Clean Energy Extension prepared an assessment of existing infrastructure, resources, and potential solar development opportunities in participating municipalities, including Blandford. This assessment was designed to describe relevant bylaws and infrastructure within the town, identify the types of solar facilities that could be developed, and quantify the total space available for each type of facility. In this report, we reviewed existing electricity grid infrastructure, and the potential to interconnect additional solar facilities. At the present time, most distribution lines providing electricity to Blandford are over-saturated with authorized and proposed solar projects, and cannot accommodate additional solar projects to interconnect to the grid. We can expect significant upgrades to these circuits, if any of the in-process projects are to proceed, which might then free up additional capacity for new projects. There is one circuit which serves a section of North Blandford Road that is not over-saturated; for the immediate future, this is the most cost-effective location for new large-scale projects to be sited. Meanwhile, most three-phase lines could likely accommodate additional small-to-medium scale projects (under 200 kW), and most single-phase lines could likely accommodate additional projects under 50 kW in size. This description represents the local grid infrastructure as it is - planning for future scenarios of development could include recommendations for areas of grid infrastructure improvement to allow siting of distributed generation in preferred locations. Future scenarios may also include the addition energy storage and other "non-wires alternatives."

14 SOLAR ENERGY↗
DOE OSTI2026

Two-Stage Wildlife Event Classification for Edge Deployment

Camera-based wildlife monitoring is often overwhelmed by non-target triggers and slowed by manual review or cloud-dependent inference, which can prevent timely intervention for high stakes human–wildlife conflicts. Our key contribution is a deployable, fully offline edge vision sensor that achieves near-real-time, highly accurate wildlife event classification by combining detector-based empty-image suppression with a lightweight classifier trained with a staged transfer-learning curriculum. Specifically, Stage 1 uses a pretrained You Only Look Once (YOLO)-family detector for permissive animal localization and empty-trigger suppression, and Stage 2 uses a lightweight EfficientNet-based binary classifier to confirm puma on detector crops and gate downstream actions. Our design is robust to low-quality nighttime monochrome imagery (motion blur, low contrast, illumination artifacts, and partial-body captures) and operates using commercially available components in connectivity-limited settings. In field deployments running since May 2025, end-to-end latency from camera trigger to action command is approximately 4 s. Ablation studies using a dataset of labeled wildlife images (pumas, not pumas) show that the two-stage approach substantially reduces false alarms in identifying pumas relative to a full-image classifier while maintaining high recall. On the held-out test set (N = 1434 events), the proposed two-stage cascade achieves precision 0.983, recall 0.975, F1 0.979, accuracy 0.986, and balanced accuracy 0.983, with only 8 false positives and 12 false negatives. The system can be easily adapted for other species, as demonstrated by rapid retraining of the second stage to classify ringtails. Downstream responses (e.g., notifications and optional audio/light outputs) provide flexible actuation capabilities that can be configured to support intervention.

58 GEOSCIENCES↗
DOE OSTI2022

Horizons: nuclear astrophysics in the 2020s and beyond

Nuclear astrophysics is a field at the intersection of nuclear physics and astrophysics, which seeks to understand the nuclear engines of astronomical objects and the origin of the chemical elements. This white paper summarizes progress and status of the field, the new open questions that have emerged, and the tremendous scientific opportunities that have opened up with major advances in capabilities across an ever growing number of disciplines and subfields that need to be integrated. We take a holistic view of the field discussing the unique challenges and opportunities in nuclear astrophysics in regards to science, diversity, education, and the interdisciplinarity and breadth of the field. Clearly nuclear astrophysics is a dynamic field with a bright future that is entering a new era of discovery opportunities.

73 NUCLEAR PHYSICS AND RADIATION PHYSICS↗
DOE OSTI2024

Wide Bandgap Generation (WBGen): Developing the Future Wide Bandgap Power Electronics Engineering Workforce

This Final Technical Report (FTR) summarizes the work conducted at the Center for Power Electronics Systems (CPES) under the Wide-Bandgap Generation (WBGen) fellowship and traineeship program established by the Advanced Manufacturing and Technologies Office (AMMTO) of the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE) at Virginia Tech, which had as main objective to train the next generation of U.S. citizen power engineers with wide-bandgap (WBG) power semiconductor expertise, with the intent to aid in fulfilling the future workforce needs in this field. The latter was deemed of strategic importance given the fast-paced growth observed—and predicted—in the demand of this technical expertise, whose practitioners have become the enablers and executioners of the electrification transformation process that not just the U.S., but the whole world, is currently undergoing as it seeks for more effective and efficient ways to use energy. As such, the WBGen program set forth to achieve its educational goals, which in addition sought to broaden the range of WBG-based power electronics by conducting research and development on high-efficiency grid apparatus and high-efficiency electrical power systems, and to also enhance the power engineering curriculum by formalizing WBG-oriented design procedures replacing existent yet now obsolete design procedures developed for Silicon (Si) based power electronics. This effort led CPES to spearhead the development of a new major within The Bradley Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) Department at Virginia Tech, namely Electronic Power and Energy Systems (EPES), which coalesced power electronics and power systems courses to provide undergraduate students with a strong formation in the power engineering field, while creating a pipeline of graduate students that could pursue the WBG-based curriculum and conduct research at CPES. In all, in what is considered a true success, eight of the twenty WBGen fellows that graduated program were recruited from the ECE department undergraduate cohort. The traineeship emphasized as well, from its beginning, the partnership with industry and national laboratories, which took advantage of the successful industry consortium at CPES that has historically been formed by 80–90 power and energy companies working in close collaboration with the center. This gave WBGen fellows the accessibility and possibility to conduct internships at partner facilities during the summer months, focused solely on the evaluation, testing, and adoption of WBG devices, which were many times tightly related to their respective research work and plans. In addition, WBGen fellows conducted their main research work within the confines of research programs at CPES conducted with these industry partners, providing them with a unique opportunity to develop not just their technical expertise—while advancing their knowledge, but to also learn and practice a slew of skills needed for their professional growth. As such, the fellows tackled a variety of WBG-related research topics, from device reliability and capability aspects as well as packaging and integration, encompassing the use of advanced materials and new structures, current sharing challenges, and insulation systems, to advanced gate-drivers with integrated sensors and protection mechanisms and active current- and voltage-based control, to optimized layouts seeking to maximize the switching and power processing performance of these devices, to power processing solutions adopting Gallium-Nitride (GaN) and Silicon-Carbide (SiC) power semiconductors for a variety of applications; including radiation-hardened converters for space dc distribution systems, direct three-phase ac-to-ac power converters for aerospace systems, dc-ac inverters for automotive traction drives, high-frequency isolated dc-dc battery chargers also for heavy transportation systems, and medium-voltage dc-dc and dc-ac converters for distribution systems and future power grids. The WBGen program ultimately graduated a total of 20 power engineers, all experts on WBG-based power electronics, awarding 18 M.S. and 2 PhD degrees in the process. These fellows, all U.S. citizens, allowed CPES to increase the number of citizens students to 33 % at the peak of the program, as the traineeship made possible the recruitment of talent with more attractive graduate research assistantship (GRA) contracts. Unfortunately, the present U.S. citizen enrollment at CPES has declined back to historic levels—approximately 10 %, as the regular GRA rates are not competitive enough when compared with entry-level industry jobs. In all, WBGen fellows published a total of 7 peer-reviewed journal articles, 44 papers at international technical conferences, made 42 presentations at international technical conferences, and filed 4 invention disclosures and patent applications, which have since then been granted by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). Their contribution to CPES, Virginia Tech, the United States, and the world, has been significant, and continues to yield results thanks to the exemplary career that the fellows have initiated at many of the partners of the program, which include Wolfspeed, Raytheon Technologies, Infineon, Lockheed Martin, Dominion Energy, Northrop Grumman, Rivian, Aerospace Corporation, Sandia National Laboratory, National Renewable Energy Laboratory, John Hopkins University, and Virginia Tech.

14 SOLAR 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↗