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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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Accelerating Low-Income Financing and Transactions (LIFT) for Solar Access Everywhere (Final Technical Report)

The Accelerating Low-Income Financing and Transactions (LIFT) for Solar Access Everywhere project’s goal was to expand Low-to-Moderate Income (LMI) solar access for homeowners and renters. The LIFT project researched and gathered data on 453 LMI community solar project across the country. Following three years of research, the project delivered three groundbreaking research papers in June 2022, focused on 1) customer experience, 2) the growth of community solar programs, and 3) project-level financial best practices for serving LMI communities. These were followed by a user-friendly web-based Toolkit allowing users to interact with project data and key findings in November 2022. The customer experience research examined community solar subscribers’ primary motivations to join and remain satisfied with projects. Our research identified 453 projects across the country that dedicated some portion of the system capacity to LMI households. Seventeen of these projects participated in the LIFT customer experience research, allowing the project team to survey their customers and gain insight into how LMI subscribers feel about community solar and the programs that serve them. Subscribers in our sample indicated that the most critical issue that motivated them to participate in their program, however, was not savings but helping the environment. This was true for both LMI and non-LMI subscribers. Helping the environment was also the most important issue for LMI subscribers to measure how well their program was working for them. LIFT also explored how rapidly community solar has grown since its inception in 2006, publishing results in the Growth of U.S. Community Solar Serving LMI Households report. The results showed that community solar projects serving LMI households are one of the fastest growing segments of the solar industry. The report identifies and recommends ways developers should overcome real or perceived risks to LMI customer acquisition and subscriber management. Through the analysis of community solar project finance research, LIFT showed that most community solar projects serving LMI households are financed in the same ways mainstream community solar projects are financed. The value stacks and financial returns are no different, although LMI inclusion and participation rate varied across programs in our sample, ranging from between 10% and 100%. Based on the findings from the LIFT research, the team built a web-based user-friendly Toolkit, consisting of case studies, project finance best practices, and several tools built around the national dataset of 453 community solar projects that serve LMI households. These allow users to engage with the dataset in multiple ways; to explore the landscape of LMI community solar in the U.S., and to design community solar projects to optimize LMI inclusion, equity, and savings levels. The Toolkit also includes a library of LIFT-generated and LIFT-curated resources for users to learn more about how to best serve LMI communities through community solar. LIFT officially published the Toolkit on October 31, 2022, followed by a launch event (public webinar) on November 17, 2022. The core LIFT partners continue to engage in outreach and dissemination efforts to promote the LIFT Toolkit and research publications. Our driving motivation is to continue enabling solar developers to leverage the findings of this three-year research effort. By implication, the LIFT Toolkit is designed for use by utilities, energy service providers, and financiers or investors as a learning and decision-making tool to rapidly scale project models that optimize LMI inclusion and maximize real household savings.

14 SOLAR ENERGY↗

Community Solar Consolidated Billing: An Exploration of Implementation and Alternatives

The report presents an analysis of the considerations, costs, and benefits surrounding the implementation of utility consolidated billing in community solar programs while also exploring alternatives to achieve similar benefits in its absence. Consolidated billing simplifies the billing process for customers by combining all charges and credits associated with electricity service and community solar subscriptions into a single bill. The potential benefits of consolidated billing implementation include increased transparency, improved customer experience, and ultimately increased retention rates and decreased subscriber acquisition costs. Currently, community solar subscribers often receive two separate bills - one from the utility and one from a third-party community solar provider - potentially causing confusion. Consolidated billing seeks to resolve this by offering a unified bill, which, while beneficial to numerous stakeholders, presents administrative, technical, and financial hurdles that utilities and program administrators must address.

14 SOLAR ENERGY↗

Community Solar Consolidated Billing: An Exploration of Implementation and Alternatives [Slides]

This presentation is an abridged version of the report it is based on that presents an analysis of the considerations, costs, and benefits surrounding the implementation of utility consolidated billing in community solar programs while also exploring alternatives to achieve similar benefits in its absence. Consolidated billing simplifies the billing process for customers by combining all charges and credits associated with electricity service and community solar subscriptions into a single bill. The potential benefits of consolidated billing implementation include increased transparency, improved customer experience, and ultimately increased retention rates and decreased subscriber acquisition costs. Currently, community solar subscribers often receive two separate bills - one from the utility and one from a third-party community solar provider - potentially causing confusion. Consolidated billing seeks to resolve this by offering a unified bill, which, while beneficial to numerous stakeholders, presents administrative, technical, and financial hurdles that utilities and program administrators must address.

14 SOLAR ENERGY↗

A Versatile Simulated Data Transport Layer for in Situ Workflows Performance Evaluation

In situ processing does not only allow scientific applications to face the explosion in data volume and velocity but also to address the time constraints of many simulation-analysis workflows by providing scientists with early insights about their applications at runtime. Multiple frameworks implement the concept of a data transport layer (DTL) to enable such in situ workflows. These tools are very versatile, directly or indirectly access the data generated on the same node, another node of the same compute cluster, or a completely distinct node, and allow data publishers and subscribers to run on the same computing resources or not. This versatility puts on researchers the onus of taking key decisions related to resource allocation and how to transport data to ensure the most efficient execution of their in situ workflows. However, domain scientists and workflow practitioners lack the appropriate tools to assess the respective performance of particular design and deployment options. In this paper we introduce a versatile simulated DTL designed to provide researchers with insights on the respective performance of different execution scenarios of in situ workflows. This open-source, standalone library builds on the SimGrid toolkit and can be linked to any SimGrid-based simulator. It facilitates the evaluation of the performance behavior, at scale, of different data transport configurations and the study of the effects of resource allocation strategies. We demonstrate the scalability, versatility, and accuracy of this simulated DTL by reproducing the execution of two synthetic benchmarks and of a real-world in situ workflow composed of an MPI application and a parallel data analysis. Results of simulations run on a single core show that the proposed library can simulate the interactions of tens of thousands of simulated processes deployed on two interconnected commodity clusters in a few seconds, and the execution by a thousand simulated processes of an in situ workflow in less than three minutes.

Suter, Fred [ORNL] (ORCID:0000000319021955)↗

Incremental Threshold Scheme Enabled IoT Group Key Management

Cyber landscape evolves rapidly. Internet of Things (IoT) and Edge Computing (EC) have rapidly become an integral part of the modern computing infrastructure. It is expected that there will be more than 50 billion active and connected IoT devices by 2025 [1]. Pervasive IoT/EC creates unprecedented opportunities bridging the gap between previously segregated cyber and physical spaces. However, this progress also brings along new security challenges. IoT devices typically have limited computation, communication, and storage resources. This leads to security architecture designs such as using symmetric keys for group communication. While secure and efficient in stable network settings, symmetric key solutions are ill-adapted for IoT's highly dynamic device mobility behavior and frequent group membership turnover. Whenever IoT members leave a group, the known symmetric keys cannot be made forgotten, posing a serious vulnerability. This leads to frequent re-groupings that require expensive re-authentication, key regeneration, and key redistribution in order to maintain IoT/EC security. We present a novel symmetric key management framework that integrate an Incremental Threshold Scheme (ITS) cryptographical function into communication protocol's key rotation mechanism to allow for secure and efficient symmetric key communication group member node revocation. This ITS-enabled key management framework alleviates the need of frequent and expensive re-grouping and re-keying needed by today's large and dynamic IoT/EC operations. We further applied this ITS-enabled key management framework to a distributed IoT/EC-integrated publish and subscribe framework for applicability validation.

Li, Mingyan↗

Numerical Study of Liquid Piston Compression Using Large-Eddy Simulation and Volume-of-Fluid Approach

Efforts to increase the efficiency of residential and commercial air conditioners and heat pumps have demonstrated that the compressor accounts for most of the system’s electrical energy usage. Therefore, the efficiency of this component should be improved to reduce its energy usage. The US Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory developed a near-isothermal liquid piston compressor (LPC) that uses propylene glycol (PG) to compress CO2. This report presents numerical studies of the LPC in which the compression chamber fills with injected PG from the bottom inlet. Numerical simulations were performed using the large-eddy simulation (LES) with the wall-adapting local eddy-viscosity (WALE) subgrid-scale model coupled with the multiphase volume-of-fluid (VOF) model to simulate the transient interface between gas and liquid and to capture the heat and mass transfer within the compression chamber. In this effort, effects of boundary conditions applied to the LES-VOF calculations (e.g., no wall, an adiabatic wall, and a wall with a heat flux subscribed) to the overall pressure and temperature of CO2 gas as well as the transient evolution of flow and heat transfer evolution within the compression chamber are investigated and discussed. It was found that the LES calculation with no wall have shown no dynamical flow patterns and the volume-averaged temperature of CO2 increased from 305 to 392.7 K, while LES calculations with a constant wall temperature or a wall heat flux had similar increases of CO2 temperatures. Results of LES simulation using a wall heat flux showed different stages in the compression process and revealed dynamical formation and interaction of CO2 gas layers and circulation flow patterns within the chamber that contribute to the overall heat transfer between the solid wall, gas, and liquid surface in the compressor.

Nguyen, Thien D.↗

Drink From The Firehose

DFTF converts Redfish events to messages on a Kafka bus. DFTF subscribes to events in Redfish, specifically Alerts and CrayTelemetry. It listens for HTTP POST requests containing event data, reduces the data, serializes the reduced data using Avro, and publishes the data to topics in Kafka.

Morrone, ChristopherJ↗

MasQiTT

SAND2025-03471O MasQiTT software is a proof-of-concept code that implements the Secure MQTT protocol. It demonstrates a publish/subscribe model of message passing within a network where the publishers can encrypt messages according to a topic and the subscribers can decrypt those messages. The example code shows an example of deployment of an end-to-end system that includes certificate authority and key management in addition to basic implementation of the protocol. Sandia National Laboratories is a multimission laboratory managed and operated by National Technology & Engineering Solutions of Sandia, LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Honeywell International Inc., for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration under contract DE-NA0003525.

Fisher, Andrew [Sandia National Lab. (SNL-CA), Liv↗

fermi-ad/rust-pubsub-lib

A Rust library for publisher-subscriber interactions. Used to hide the implementation of whatever pub-sub service is in use (e.g., Kafka, Redis, etc.).

Curley, Jacob [Fermi National Accelerator Laborato↗

Jackson County Community Solar Modeling Results [Slides]

Jackson County, via the U.S. Department of Energy's Communities LEAP (Local Energy Action Program) requested support on the topic of Community Solar in their area. NREL completed a technical and financial modeling exercise to determine the potential for developing community solar in the region. The analysis performed determined that the current policy and economic environment, in large part due to Illinois's Solar For All program, is advantageous to the deployment and growth of community solar in Illinois. Across all 6 scenarios modeled, including current minimum and maximum financial incentives, the economics yielded positive net present values for both the project owner and its subscribers. The analysis shown in this presentation is only one of the first steps in deploying community solar and suggests Jackson County should pursue next steps. Such actions could include refining project economics, partnering with local utilities, policy makers, and developers to identify potential projects and outreach opportunities, and educating and engaging community members.

14 SOLAR ENERGY↗

Community Solar Subscription Credit Considerations and Case Study

Together New Orleans (TNO) requested technical assistance through the US Department of Energy's (DOE's) National Community Solar Partnership (NCSP). The National Community Solar Partnership is a coalition of community solar stakeholders working to expand access to affordable community solar to every U.S. household and enable subscribers and their communities to realize meaningful benefits, such as reduced energy burden, increased resilience, community ownership, and equitable workforce development. TNO asked for a subject matter expert from NCSP to review the Entergy New Orleans (ENO) proposed revised Rate Schedule for Community Solar Generating Facilities. TNO requested that the proposed methodology for subscription credits for applicable residential and non-residential rate schedules be reviewed to determine the expected credit rate. The aim behind the analysis is to provide TNO and engaged stakeholders with an informed understanding of the proposed rate schedule before making decisions on the appropriate rate design for community solar (CS) subscriptions. This report is an exploration of CS subscription credit rate calculation considerations using the CS program in New Orleans as a case study. The report provides a framework for modeling CS credit rates in addition to topics that may be helpful to address when undertaking program design or rule making.

14 SOLAR ENERGY↗

Income Verification Strategies for Income-Based Solar Programs

The Inflation Reduction Act has created substantial new programs that support adoption of solar power by low-income households, including the $7 billion Solar For All program and the Low-Income Communities Bonus Credit Program, which increases the investment tax credit for certain types of deployment. In addition, a growing number of states are using solar programs to reduce energy burdens and create energy justice opportunities for low-income households and disadvantaged communities. Verifying the income of participating customers is an important component of these programs. Program managers are seeking strategies to verify a large number of subscribing customers in an accurate, timely, and cost-efficient manner. To help inform program managers, Berkeley Lab investigated how a number of energy and non-energy programs manage income verification. The most common approach is to require proof through tax documents, pay stubs, or other formal income documentation, which can pose an impediment to enrolling eligible customers and create a paperwork burden for administrators. In order to reduce the burden for both the applicant and the program manager, some programs use alternative methods. We identify three common alternative verification methods: -Categorical eligibility: Customers enrolled in other, similar income-verified assistance programs are automatically eligible for enrollment in other income-qualified programs. -Geographic eligibility: Eligibility is based on the customer’s location within a specified area, typically a low-income or disadvantaged community or census tract, and; -“Self-attestation”: The participant claims eligibility with or without further documentation. We describe these options, their pros and cons, give examples of how they are used, and explore how some low-income programs address administrative issues, audits, or other quality control measures. Finally, we explore the risk of mistaken verifications (finding a participant eligible when they are not) in the different strategies. While this memo was initiated by a request relating to income-based community solar programs, the methods are applicable to any program with income eligibility requirements in the energy or non-energy sector. Funding was provided for this research by the Solar Energy Technologies Office of the US Department of Energy, through the National Community Solar Partnership.

14 SOLAR ENERGY↗

Liquid Piston with Spray Cooling Near-Isothermal Compressor

The goal of this project was to prototype and characterize the performance of a liquid-piston spray-cooled gas compressor. The working principle of the compressor enables optimized high-efficiency operation over a very wide range of operating conditions, unlike conventional compressors that are optimized for a narrow range of operating conditions. The compressor technology is suitable for many applications, such as gas pipeline transport, gas storage, and commercial and residential heat pumps. Both physical testing and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) modeling of the processes using the Oak Ridge National Laboratory high-performance computing center were completed. The experimental and CFD studies focused on a near-isothermal liquid-piston compressor (LPC) that uses propylene glycol to compress CO 2 . The first prototype demonstrated isothermal operation during several sequentially executed cycles of CO 2 compression and raised the temperature of the compressed CO 2 by only 2 K, compared with approximately 6 K when the gas was compressed non-isothermally. Isothermal operation was demonstrated at CO 2 flow rates of up to 2 L/min. The second prototype was designed with two compression chambers to allow continuous flow of high-pressure CO 2 . However, the design of the valve train to direct flow between the compression chambers was not sufficient to allow demonstration of CO 2 compression. Numerical simulations of the LPC in which the compression chamber was filled with propylene glycol injected from the bottom inlet were performed using large eddy simulation (LES) with the wall-adapting local eddy-viscosity subgrid-scale model coupled with the multiphase volume of fluid (VOF) model to simulate the transient interface between gas and liquid and to capture the heat and mass transfers within the compression chamber. In this effort, the effects of boundary conditions applied to the LES-VOF calculations (i.e., no wall, an adiabatic wall, and a wall with a heat flux subscribed) on the overall pressure and temperature of the CO 2 gas as well as the transient evolution of flow and heat transfer within the compression chamber were investigated and are discussed in this report. The LES calculation with no wall showed no dynamical flow patterns, and the volume-averaged temperature of CO 2 increased from 305 to 392.7 K, whereas LES calculations with a constant wall temperature or a wall heat flux had similar increases of CO 2 temperatures. The results of the LES simulation using a wall heat flux showed different stages in the compression process and revealed dynamical formation and interaction of CO 2 gas layers and circulation flow patterns within the chamber that contributed to the overall heat transfer between the solid wall, gas, and liquid surface in the compressor. Though an industrial partnership for commercializing the compressor was not secured, the technology was attractive for an industrial partner to use in two research proposals in response to US Department of Energy funding opportunity announcements.

32 ENERGY CONSERVATION, CONSUMPTION, AND UTILIZATI↗

Inclusive Shared Solar Initiative (ISSI) (Final Technical Report)

Between 2020 and 2024, the Inclusive Shared Solar Initiative (ISSI) served as a forum for three states to navigate the design and development of LMI-accessible community solar projects. A collaboration between the National Association of State Energy Officials (NASEO) and National Energy Assistance Directors Association (NEADA), ISSI provided financial and technical assistance to teams of State Energy Offices and State LIHEAP Agencies in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and the District of Columbia. The key goals guiding ISSI were to develop four new community solar frameworks in three new states and create greater momentum among state governments, community solar developers, and the finance community in scaling and investing in community solar projects that are affordable and accessible to LIHEAP households. Ultimately, in addition to developing and launching four new shared solar projects serving LMI subscribers, the ISSI state partners pioneered community solar policy and program design strategies that increased protections for low-income consumers, reduced barriers to enrollment and project development, and fostered inter-program coordination.

14 SOLAR ENERGY↗

Watchmen 3.3.0 User Guide: Revision 9

Watchmen is a research software application developed by Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) that incorporates the scientific and operational expertise for reviewing data from treaty monitoring radionuclide stations. The radionuclide stations are part of the International Monitoring System (IMS), a worldwide network to monitor for nuclear explosions. The data the IMS produces are critical to determine if a radionuclide release event is from a nuclear explosion. Stations deliver their measurements and system status to the International Data Centre (IDC), which forwards it via email to all subscribers. Watchmen is capable of processing data from several radioxenon station types.

97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING↗

Community Solar Project Models: An Introduction to Basic Financial and Administrative Relationships [Slides]

This resource is a collection of visual aids and descriptions to help explain the basic financial and administrative relationships underpinning common community solar project models. The graphics in this resource depict the flow of electricity from generation to consumption and the financial exchanges between the community solar project owner, subscribers, and distribution utility. Community solar models vary based on ownership (e.g., third party, utility), customer type (e.g., multifamily, single-household), and solar array location (e.g., on-site, off-site).

14 SOLAR ENERGY↗

Natural Hazard Forecast Alert Grid Risk System

Weather events cause most power outages. Often, we even get notifications on our phones to take cover or be prepared for an imminent event. If electric grid utilities had a similar warning that also included probable scenarios and the equipment involved, they could prepare and minimize the effects. Idaho National Laboratory had a project with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Cybersecurity, Energy Security, and Emergency Response program to develop a grid alert application that receives messages from the existing emergency alert system, filters and determines components possibly affected by the emergency event, calculates probable scenarios using MASTERRI (Modeling And Simulation for Targeted Reliability and Resilience Improvement). For high-risk events, the application can then send alert links to subscribed electric distribution utility operations staff to allow them to see and evaluate the scenarios and the impact in a web based interactive map tool. This proof of concept application used data from utilities and organizations, such as the international regulatory body North American Electric Reliability Corporation, which have complied historical failure data of elements that comprise the U.S. electric grid. Nominal failure rates are obtained from this data. To make this tool possible, estimated failure rates were calculated for different component types given the alert type, severity, and location. Historic weather-related grid element failures were correlated with historic weather events from the Integrated Public Alert & Warning System. These correlated events and failures are used along with Bayesian updates from the historical norms to provide a modified failure rate for grid elements in the alert areas and calculate probable scenarios. Working with an industry collaborator, actual grid models and data were used for demonstration cases. This report outlines the work performed for this project.

24 - POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗

Community Solar Program Design and Subscription Models

This slide deck provides an overview of community solar program design and subscription models. It introduces and explains the different elements of community solar program and subscription design, and proves proven practices and considerations when designing a community solar program. This slide deck was originally developed as part of a working group under the National Community Solar Partnership's Municipal Utility Collaborative.

community solar↗