With numerous options for the future of natural gas, how do we know we're going down the right path? How do we designate a metric to measure and demonstrate change and progress, and how does that metric incorporate all stakeholders and scenarios?

This presentation summarized key findings of electronic power scenarios from a recent JISEA report.

The U.S. Department of Energy is conducting an assessment of vulnerabilities of the U.S. energy sector to climate change and extreme weather. Emphasizing peer reviewed research, it seeks to quantify vulnerabilities and identify specific knowledge or technology gaps. It draws upon a July 2012 workshop, ?Climate Change and Extreme Weather Vulnerability Assessment of the US Energy Sector?, hosted by the Atlantic Council and sponsored by DOE to solicit industry input.

Keynote presentation given at the 2013 NTEA Green Truck Summit titled Partnering with Industry to Shape the Future.

This presentation explains how liquid desiccant based coupled with an indirect evaporative cooler can efficiently produce cool, dry air, and how a liquid desiccant membrane air conditioner can efficiently provide cooling and dehumidification without the carryover problems of previous generations of liquid desiccant systems. It provides an overview to a liquid desiccant DX air conditioner that can efficiently provide cooling and dehumidification to high latent loads without the need for reheat, explains how liquid desiccant cooling and dehumidification systems can outperform vapor compression based air conditioning systems in hot and humid climates, explains how liquid desiccant cooling and dehumidification systems work, and describes a refrigerant free liquid desiccant based cooling system.

Concentrating solar power (CSP) deployed with thermal energy storage (TES) provides a dispatchable source of renewable energy. The value of CSP with TES, as with other potential generation resources, needs to be established using traditional utility planning tools. Production cost models, which simulate the operation of grid, are often used to estimate the operational value of different generation mixes. CSP with TES has historically had limited analysis in commercial production simulations. This document describes the implementation of CSP with TES in a commercial production cost model. It also describes the simulation of grid operations with CSP in a test system consisting of two balancing areas located primarily in Colorado.

Temperature has a significant impact on life, performance, and safety of lithium-ion battery technology, which is expected to be the energy storage of choice for electric drive vehicles (xEVs). High temperatures degrade Li-ion cells faster while low temperatures reduce power and energy capabilities that could have cost, reliability, range, or drivability implications. Thermal management of battery packs in xEVs is essential to keep the cells in the desired temperature range and also reduce cell-to-cell temperature variations, both of which impact life and performance. The value that the battery thermal management system provides in reducing battery life and improving performance outweighs its additional cost and complexity. Tools that are essential for thermal management of batteries are infrared thermal imaging, isothermal calorimetry, thermal conductivity meter and computer-aided thermal analysis design software. This presentation provides details of these tools that NREL has used and we believe are needed to design right-sized battery thermal management systems.

This presentation describes the results of NREL technology assessments for two early market full cell applications, backup power and material handling equipment.

The ACP and IRIS are developed to establish a world reference for calibrating pyrgeometers with traceability to SI units. The two radiometers are unwindowed with negligible spectral dependence, and traceable to SI units through the temperature scale (ITS-90). The first outdoor comparison between the two designs was held from January 28 to February 8, 2013 at the Physikalisch-Metorologisches Observatorium Davos (PMOD). The difference between the irradiance measured by ACP and that of IRIS was within 1 W/m2. A difference of 5 W/m2 was observed between the irradiance measured by ACP&IRIS and that of the interim World Infrared Standard Group (WISG).

The U.S. Department of Energy-sponsored Transportation Energy Futures (TEF) project examines how combining multiple strategies could reduce both GHG emissions and petroleum use by 80%. The project's primary objective was to help inform domestic decisions about transportation energy strategies, priorities, and investments, with an emphasis on previously underexplored opportunities related to energy efficiency and renewable energy in light-duty vehicles, non-light-duty vehicles, fuels, and transportation demand. This PowerPoint provides an overview of the project and its findings.

This presentation examines trends in wind plant cost of energy over the last several decades and discusses methods and examples of projections for future cost trends. First, the presentation explores cost trends for wind energy from the 1980s, where there had been an overall downward trend in wind plant energy costs. Underlying factors that influenced these trends, including turbine technology innovation for lower wind speed sites, are explored. Next, the presentation looks at projections for the future development of wind energy costs and discusses a variety of methods for establishing these projections including the use of learning curves, qualitative assessment using expert elicitation, and engineering-based analysis. A comparison of the methods is provided to explore their relative merits. Finally, a brief introduction is provided for the U.S. Department of Energy program-wide shift towards an integrative use of qualitative and quantitative methods for assessing the potential impacts of wind plant technology innovations on reducing the wind plant cost of energy.

This analysis evaluates CSP with TES in a scenario where California derives 33% of its electricity from renewable energy sources. It uses a commercial grid simulation tool to examine the avoided operational and capacity costs associated with CSP and compares this value to PV and a baseload generation with constant output. Overall, the analysis demonstrates several properties of dispatchable CSP, including the flexibility to generate during periods of high value and avoid generation during periods of lower value. Of note in this analysis is the fact that significant amount of operational value is derived from the provision of reserves in the case where CSP is allowed to provide these services. This analysis also indicates that the 'optimal' configuration of CSP could vary as a function of renewable penetration, and each configuration will need to be evaluated in terms of its ability to provide dispatchable energy, reserves, and firm capacity. The model can be used to investigate additional scenarios involving alternative technology options and generation mixes, applying these scenarios within California or in other regions of interest.

This presentation provides an overview of the Built Environment Energy Analysis Tool, which is designed to assess impacts of future land use/built environment patterns on transportation-related energy use and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. The tool can be used to evaluate a range of population distribution and urban design scenarios for 2030 and 2050. This tool was produced as part of the Transportation Energy Futures (TEF) project, a Department of Energy-sponsored multi-agency project initiated to pinpoint underexplored strategies for abating GHGs and reducing petroleum dependence related to transportation.

The Department of Energy's Geothermal Technologies Office (GTO) provides RD&D funding for geothermal exploration technologies with the goal of lowering the risks and costs of geothermal development and exploration. In 2012, NREL was tasked with developing a metric to measure the impacts of this RD&D funding on the cost and time required for exploration activities. The development of this metric included collecting cost and time data for exploration techniques, creating a baseline suite of exploration techniques to which future exploration and cost and time improvements could be compared, and developing an online tool for graphically showing potential project impacts (all available at <a href="http://en.openei.org/wiki/Gateway:Geothermal">http://en.openei.org/wiki/Gateway:Geothermal</a>). The conference paper describes the methodology used to define the baseline exploration suite of techniques (baseline), as well as the approach that was used to create the cost and time data set that populates the baseline. The resulting product, an online tool for measuring impact, and the aggregated cost and time data are available on the Open EI website for public access (<a href="http://en.openei.org">http://en.openei.org</a>).

This presentation discusses the evaluation of a lower-energy energy storage system for full-hybrid electric vehicles.

The Jefferson Lab Angular Momentum (JAM) collaboration is a new initiative aimed to the study of the angular-momentum-dependent structure of the nucleon. First results on the determination of spin-dependent parton distribution functions from world data on polarized deep-inelastic scattering will be presented and compared with previous determinations from other groups. Different aspects of global QCD analysis will be discussed, including effects due to nuclear structure, higher twist, and target-mass corrections, as well as the impact of different data selections.

This presentation summarizes findings of NREL's Renewable Electricity Futures study, published in June 2012. RE Futures investigated the challenges and impacts of achieving very high renewable electricity generation levels in the contiguous United States by 2050.

This presentation summarizes findings of NREL's Renewable Electricity Futures study, published in June 2012. RE Futures investigated the challenges and impacts of achieving very high renewable electricity generation levels in the contiguous United States by 2050.

Wind turbine power output is known to be a strong function of wind speed, but is also affected by turbulence and shear. In this work, new aerostructural simulations of a generic 1.5 MW turbine are used to explore atmospheric influences on power output. Most significant is the hub height wind speed, followed by hub height turbulence intensity and then wind speed shear across the rotor disk. These simulation data are used to train regression trees that predict the turbine response for any combination of wind speed, turbulence intensity, and wind shear that might be expected at a turbine site. For a randomly selected atmospheric condition, the accuracy of the regression tree power predictions is three times higher than that of the traditional power curve methodology. The regression tree method can also be applied to turbine test data and used to predict turbine performance at a new site. No new data is required in comparison to the data that are usually collected for a wind resource assessment. Implementing the method requires turbine manufacturers to create a turbine regression tree model from test site data. Such an approach could significantly reduce bias in power predictions that arise because of different turbulence and …

This presentation provides an overview of the nation's biofuels industry accomplishments and a perspective on the challenges and implications of reaching goals set in the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS).

This presentation discusses the need for a set of tests for modules that would predict their long term-field performance.

This presentation describes fatigue experiments and discusses dynamic mechanical loading for Cu ribbon interconnects.

This presentation discusses a method of accounting for realistic levels of driver aggression to higher-level vehicle studies, including the impact of variation in real-world driving characteristics (acceleration and speed) on vehicle energy consumption and different powertrains (e.g., conventionally powered vehicles versus electrified drive vehicles [xEVs]). Aggression variation between drivers can increase fuel consumption by more than 50% or decrease it by more than 20% from average. The normalized fuel consumption deviation from average as a function of population percentile was found to be largely insensitive to powertrain. However, the traits of ideal driving behavior are a function of powertrain. In conventional vehicles, kinetic losses dominate rolling resistance and aerodynamic losses. In xEVs with regenerative braking, rolling resistance and aerodynamic losses dominate. The relation of fuel consumption predicted from real-world drive data to that predicted by the industry-standard HWFET, UDDS, LA92, and US06 drive cycles was not consistent across powertrains, and varied broadly from the mean, median, and mode of real-world driving. A drive cycle synthesized by NREL's DRIVE tool accurately and consistently reproduces average real-world for multiple powertrains within 1%, and can be used to calculate the fuel consumption effects of varying levels of driver aggression.

This presentation discusses the effects of temperature on large format lithium-ion batteries in electric drive vehicles.