NREL Partnership Successes Help Transform National Energy Landscape
April 29, 2019 -- The National Renewable Energy Laboratory's (NREL's) Technology Transfer Director Anne Miller enjoys the drive out to Denver International Airport (DIA)—but not because of her destination. Instead, she has been fascinated to watch as the Peña Station NEXT zero energy campus emerged from the high plains near the airport.
The change—like so many others—was enabled by a partnership with NREL. The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) national laboratory already has some 850 active partnership agreements with more than 500 partners in industry, government, and academia.
In the case of Peña Station NEXT, Xcel Energy and Panasonic announced in July 2017 a collaboration with NREL, DIA, and LC Fulenwider, Inc. to study the implementation of a carbon-neutral energy district master plan near the airport. 'I always get a charge out of it,' Miller said. 'At NREL, we heard about this project in the design stage, partnered, and now it's taking shape. That's pretty exciting.'
During an 18-month project completed last fall, NREL staff combined the laboratory's building energy system model, URBANopt, with grid modeling software, OpenDSS, to model the interaction of the district with the grid.
'We produced a number of different designs for the system,' said NREL researcher Bri-Mathias Hodge. 'We were able to show the trade-offs between the economics of the system and the reliability of the system,' he said, by citing different uses of energy technologies—such as energy storage, photovoltaics (PV), and energy efficiency—in the modeling.
The NREL team used the unique visualization tools at the laboratory's Energy Systems Integration Facility (ESIF) to allow the stakeholders to react together to the various scenarios. The results were unprecedented insights for the project backers.
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