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Nrel: a Year in Clean Energy Innovations NREL: in Clean Energy A Year Innovations | A Review of NREL’s 2013 A Review Feature of NREL’s Stories NREL: A YEAR IN CLEAN ENERGY INNOVATIONS National Renewable Energy Laboratory 15013 Denver West Parkway, Golden, CO 80401 303-275-3000 • www.nrel.gov NREL is a national laboratory of the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy Operated by the Alliance for Sustainable Energy, LLC NREL/BK-6A42-61187 • February 2014 A Review of NREL’s 2013 Feature Stories Printed with a renewable-source ink on paper containing at least 50% wastepaper, including 10% post consumer waste. NREL is a national laboratory of the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, operated by the Alliance for Sustainable Energy, LLC. Cover photo by Dennis Schroeder, NREL 26174 CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 1 LBAOA OR T RY OF THE FUTURE 59 At NREL, Sustainability Goes Beyond Campus 60 ADVANCED VEHICLES & FUELS 3 NREL Takes Efficiency to the Great Outdoors 62 Biomass Analysis Tool Is Faster, More Precise 4 RSF Influences New High Performance Buildings 65 NREL Drives Toward the Future with Fuel Cell EVs 7 Wood-Boring Gribbles Intrigue Researchers 10 NAN TIO al AND INTERNATIONal IMPACTS 71 B UILDINGS 13 Nation Could Double Energy Productivity 72 Architects and Building Engineers Flock to NREL 14 NREL Teams with Navy to Cut Energy Use 76 NREL Adds Eyes, Brains to Occupancy Detection 17 Saudi Arabia Looks to NREL for Solar 79 Monitoring Expertise NREL Brings Precision, Savings to Energy Audits 19 NREL Engineer Passionate about Energy- 22 Efficient Buildings S OLAR 83 Device Tosses Out Unusable PV Wafers 84 Weatherization Work Guidelines Launched 25 New Solar Cell Is More Efficient, Less Costly 86 COMMUNITY OuTREACH 29 NREL Test Helps Make Moisture Barriers Better 89 Fresh Faces Abundant at Colorado Science Bowl 30 Third Consecutive IEEE Cherry Award for NREL 92 Interns Make Robust Contribution to NREL 32 Middle Schoolers Shine in Electric Car Races 35 TOEchN LOGY TraNSFER 97 Bright Ideas Chase Investor Dollars at Forum 98 CMUO P TATIONAL SCIENCE 39 Makeover Puts CHARMM Back in Business 40 W IND 103 Change Is in the Air at NREL’s Wind Center 104 New Ultra-Efficient HPC Data Center Debuts 44 New Test Facility to Improve Wind Turbines 107 Scientists Go Eye to Eye with Research at ESIF 47 ABBR EVIATIONS AND ACRONYMS 110 E NERGY SYSTEMS INTEGRATION 51 Energy Secretary Dedicates ESIF at NREL 52 NREL Connects EVs and Grid Integration 55 WWW.NREL.GOV INTRODUCTION The Energy Department’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) is the nation’s primary laboratory for renewable energy and energy efficiency research and development. NREL’s mission and strategy are focused on advancing the Energy Department’s and our nation’s energy goals. The laboratory’s scientists and researchers support critical market objectives to accelerate research from scientific innovations to market-viable alternative energy solutions. At the core of this strategic direction are NREL’s research and technology development competencies. These areas span from understanding renewable resources for energy, to the conversion of these resources to renewable electricity and fuels, and ultimately to the use of renewable electricity and fuels in homes, commercial buildings, and vehicles. What follows is a compilation of articles featuring NREL research and development, deployment, commercialization, and outreach activities in 2013. The feature stories can be found online at www.nrel.gov/features. Questions about these articles should be directed to NREL’s Public Affairs Office by calling 303-275-4090 or sending an email to [email protected]. Photo by Dennis Schroeder, NREL 27743 1 ADVANCED VEHICLES & FUELS Working in partnership with public and private organizations, NREL researches, develops, and demonstrates innovative vehicle and fuel technologies that reduce the nation’s dependence on imported oil and improve our energy security and air quality. Photo by Dennis Schroeder, NREL 19931 3 WWW.NRel.GOV ADVANCED VEHICLES & FUELS Finding that particular species, or that individual tree, that has the genetic markers for the optimal biofuel candidate has Biomass Analysis Tool Is Faster, heretofore been laborious and painstaking. More Precise The Energy Independence and Security Act requires that the United States produce 21 billion gallons of non-corn-based biofuel by 2022. The market for biofuels is expected to grow steadily between now and then. Market analysts say the successful companies will be those that can steer their enzymes through the cell-wall structures in the easiest and A screening tool from the Energy Department’s National most cost-effective ways, including by making changes in the Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) eases and greatly structures themselves. quickens one of the thorniest tasks in the biofuels industry: determining cell wall chemistry to find plants with ideal genes. T ool Can Pinpoint Phenotypes To find out the chemical composition of the cell walls, companies NREL’s new High-Throughput Analytical Pyrolysis tool (HTAP) have to sample large quantities of biomass, whether it’s can thoroughly analyze hundreds of biomass samples a day switchgrass, remnants of corn stalks, fast-growing trees, and give an early look at the genotypes that are most worth or algae. pursuing. Analysis of a sample that previously took two weeks can now be done in two minutes. That is potentially game The traditional strategy had been a multistep approach changing for tree nurseries and the biomass industry. involving sample dissolution and chromatographic analysis, which can determine what the tree is composed of—but at the When it comes to making fuels out of trees, crops, grasses, or cost of disintegrating the sample. algae, it’s all about the cell walls of the plants. Will they make it hard or easy for enzymes to turn the biomass into sugars? NREL developed an approach using pyrolysis, analyzing the Differences in cell walls are enormous, and choosing the right vapor from the samples produced by heat in the absence of ones can make the difference between a profit and a loss for oxygen, which is called high-throughput analysis pyrolysis, tree growers, or between a fruitful or fruitless feedstock line for or HTAP. Pyrolysis destroys the sample, but the sample is biomass companies. This tray of 80-milliliter samples was taken from a standard poplar tree, such as the one pictured here. It is ready to be loaded into NREL’s molecular beam mass spectrometer for rapid analysis of the cell wall chemistry of each sample. Photo by Dennis Schroeder, NREL 20223 4 ADVANCED VEHICLES & FUELS ADVANCED VEHICLES & FUELS tiny—four milligrams for the pyrolysis approach versus 10 “We put the samples in our mass spectrometer, which looked grams for the traditional approach. at their genetic transformations and the associated cell-wall chemistry changes,” Davis said. They discerned dozens of Difference in Signal Intensity Identifies changes in transgenic biomass samples, each slight genetic Gene Manipulations tweak corresponding with a slight difference in the amount of lignin in the sample. The lignin in a plant is crucial for its development and insect resistance, but it can stand in the way of enzymes that want NREL was able to tell ArborGen that one sample had, say, to get at the sugars locked up in the carbohydrates. It’s the half the lignin of another sample. “We were giving them deconstruction of the raw sugars that produces the sugars the information in a week that it took a month or two for them to biofuels industry finds valuable. get somewhere else,” Davis said. “Not only that, but we were getting better information and greater chemical specificity and Lignin is a big molecule. Heating it up in the absence of resolution than they had seen before.” oxygen—pyrolysis—breaks it down into smaller fragments that can be read by a molecular beam mass spectrometer. An Explosion in Demand for Quick Sampling The ratios of lignin to carbohydrate components, together with NREL had previously partnered with scientists from Oak the intensity of the lignin peaks, can tell a scientist how easily a Ridge National Laboratory, the University of Florida, and the plant will give up its sugars. University of California, Davis, to demonstrate that the HTAP HTAP integrates a molecular beam mass spectrometer with method could combine with genetic information to identify the pyrolysis unit to quickly determine chemical signatures genetic markers associated with cell wall chemistry traits. (phenotypes) on small amounts of biomass samples that can be NREL’s pyrolysis combined with a mass spectrometer was a big used for, among other things, identifying the genes controlling improvement over the old method of using wet chemistry to the chemical makeup. analyze, but the approach wasn’t nearly fast enough to meet demand. Samples drop into the oven, where the pyrolysis creates a vapor that is read by the mass spectrometer—a chemical fingerprint. It still took a week to analyze samples from just 250 trees. The auto-sampler quickly moves the samples into place and “We were doing everything manually in a heated furnace,” back out again, so the measurements can be taken every couple Davis said. “A single person would stand there all day of minutes or so. Combining the HTAP chemical phenotypes feeding in samples.” Even with this approach, the method that with information such as genetic markers can signal there is would soon evolve into HTAP identified numerous genetic a gene nearby that controls those chemical phenotypes—for markers associated with cell wall chemistry and provided better or worse. greater chemical specificity and resolution than had been available before. HTAP can potentially reduce the amount of energy needed for ethanol production, said NREL’s Mark Davis, principal So, NREL used money from its internal general purpose investigator on the HTAP project.
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