With Strategic Partnerships, NREL’s Bid for Intelligent, Self-Organizing Energy Systems Spreads Outside the Lab.
What started as a vision paper and skillful controls for power flow is now influencing all fronts of the transition to clean and secure energy systems. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s (NREL’s) Autonomous Energy Systems work has been used commercially, applied in cross-cutting demonstrations, and is continually pushing the scientific edge of controls and optimization. It was also the subject of a May 2022 workshop, “Autonomous Energy Systems — Strategic Public and Private Partnerships,” which took a step beyond the basic science that has occupied much of the work to date, to gather input about applications on live systems.
“We have made fundamental breakthroughs in autonomous energy systems, really setting the course for a new body of work. Now we are looking to expand into partner applications that could benefit from this work,” said Fei Ding, NREL research lead of the Autonomous Energy Systems Strategic Partnership portfolio. “This past workshop was meant to get stakeholders together to identify challenges and barriers, and to understand how we can apply what NREL has developed.”
The two-day workshop kicked off with a review of past developments and introduced NREL’s push for strategic partnerships around Autonomous Energy Systems. One such prior partnership, which applied advanced distribution system and distributed energy resources controls in a Colorado neighborhood, set the stage for how organizations can apply NREL’s progress. Another ongoing partnership was introduced, in which NREL is lending technical expertise to a 580-building retrofit in Portland, Oregon, as part of the Building Technologies Office Connected Communities effort. The partnership will develop the building inventory into a 1.4 MW flexible load resource with the ability to participate in bulk services.
On the next day, discussion centered on opportunities for applications and demonstrations, and brought together representatives from a range of backgrounds — tech, vehicles, utilities, city governments, and product developers — to weigh in on how NREL’s work will be useful and on what applications to explore next.
NREL’s Autonomous Energy Systems research is creating automated and intelligent solutions at all scales and connecting all sectors. NREL is now developing strategic partnerships to prepare these solutions for system deployment.
Applications Already Underway
As NREL solicits input about how to steer the Autonomous Energy Systems portfolio, other projects are already carrying the work forward. The project REORG: Resilience and Stability Oriented Cellular Grid Formation, funded by the U.S. Department of Energy Solar Energy Technologies Office, is preparing for a field demonstration in Aspen, Colorado. The demonstration will feature a cell-based grid structure, in which the distribution grid can disperse into independent microgrids, or reintegrate, depending on circumstances. The…
Read More: Autonomous Energy Systems Expand Into Real-World Applications