Modernizing Our Grid and Energy System ESIF 2016 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. | 1 | Three years ago, we had a simple vision: let’s create clean, Peregrine—and used it to blaze new frontiers in energy affordable, and reliable energy systems at a pace and systems integration (ESI). Nearly 80 projects conducted scale that matters to society and to our economy. Rapid on Peregrine focused on accelerating the design of TABLE OF CONTENTS advances in higher efficiencies, better performance, new materials, studying the performance of vehicle and lower costs, stronger materials, and new chemistries were building components, and optimizing the interaction of 6 Grid Modernization helping to create the components of a stronger energy wind turbines for improved wind power plant performance. future, but we were lacking the place to put them all Notably, we used the expanded Peregrine to successfully together, make them work as a system, and show their model the operations of the electric grid in the eastern 6 Devices & Integrated Systems additive value. United States at an unprecedented 5-minute resolution, providing insights to operators and asset owners on the Now in our third year of operations, the U.S. Department future opportunities presented by a modernized grid. All 16 Sensing & Measurement of Energy’s (DOE’s) Energy Systems Integration Facility of this work was conducted while maintaining a world’s (ESIF) is the nation’s premier facility for the research, best power usage effectiveness of 1.04 and while installing development, and demonstration of the components and new dry cooling technology that will cut our future water 22 System Operations, Power Flow, & Control strategies needed to achieve this vision. The ESIF provides consumption in half. a unique, contained, and controlled integrated energy systems platform on which our academic, industry, or All of our capabilities and resources at the ESIF are 30 Design & Planning Tools laboratory partners can identify and resolve the technical, available to you at little or no cost by virtue of our operational, and financial risks of integrating emerging designation as a DOE user facility. During 2016, 80 energy technologies into today’s environment. academicWelcome to and the industry Energy S ystemspartners Integration used the F acilityESIF’s! unique 34 Security & Resilience megawatt-scale distribution buses for electricity, heat, We look forward to working with you and helping to make your time here as enjoyable, safe, and At the ESIF, we ask and answer complex questions about and fuel; its specialized laboratories and equipment; and productive as possible. 36 Institutional Support how our energy systems can be designed and operated its HPC and visualization spaces to design, operate, and to provide a more affordable, sustainable, and secure validateThe ESIF isour a Department future energy of Energy systems. User In F acility2017, wethat will offers provide a unique set of technologies and state-of- energy future. the-art testing capabilities. Whether you need to validate equipment for commercial applications, test new funding opportunities for high-impact projects, start 38 High Performance Computing & Visualization newclean programs energy technologies for academic at megawatt faculty andscale, graduate or advance students, research and development with our R&D 100- This 2016 ESIF annual report highlights our work in finding winning high performance computer, the ESIF has the flexibility and capacity to adapt to your project’s and expand our engineering team to support work in new ways to control and protect electric grids, showing how needs. thermal energy, fuels, and water. they can accommodate more renewables, demonstrating 45 INTEGRATE Projects In this document, you’ll find information about how to work safely at ESIF, what to do if there is an that utility-scale solar photovoltaic (PV) installations can Nowemergency, is the timeand much to bring more. your Please complex read through energy this systems carefully before you begin. provide grid services, challenging inventors to create a questions to the ESIF so that we can answer them together 48 Partners smaller inverter, determining the best way to dispatch andIf you accelerate have any questions the arrival or ofsuggestions, clean, affordable, feel free to contactand reliable me directly. battery energy storage systems (BESS), using big data to energyBest regards systems, at a pace and scale that matters. improve solar forecasting, and developing new test devices 50 DOE Program Research for hydrogen refueling. At the ESIF, we have also completed a series of groundbreaking projects under the Integrated Network Testbed for Energy Grid Research and Technology 54 Knowledge Sharing Bryan Hannegan Experimentation (INTEGRATE) initiative, funded by the U.S. Bryan Hannegan Associate LabLaboratory Director Director for Energy Systems Department of Energy (DOE), that have demonstrated new IntegrationEnergy Systems at NREL Integration approaches to operating and managing electric distribution 303-275-3009 59 User Facility Updates grids with very high levels of distributed energy resources in [email protected] an interoperable and scalable manner. www.nrel.gov/esi 60 Inventions During 2016, we also expanded the world’s leading energy efficient, high-performance computing (HPC) data center— The ESIF was established in 2013 by DOE’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE) on the campus of its National Renewable 63 Publications Energy Laboratory (NREL) and is a designated DOE user facility. | 2 | | 3 | GRID MODERNIZATION The future grid will solve the challenges of seamlessly integrating conventional and renewable sources, storage, and central and distributed generation. It will provide a critical platform for U.S. prosperity, competitiveness, and innovation in a global clean energy economy. —Grid Modernization Multi-Year Program Plan | 4 | | 5 | DEVICES & INTEGRATED Project Spotlight SYSTEMS Google Little Box Challenge Google Little Box Challenge Currently, residential solar inverters are approximately the size of a More than 100 teams from across the world submitted designs, and picnic cooler; however, there are many potential benefits to reducing 18 teams made it to the final round for evaluation at NREL. In the end, that size. Shrinking inverters by 10 times or more and making them CE+T Power’s Red Electrical Devils team from Belgium put forward the cheaper to produce and install would enable more solar-powered winning design and took home the $1 million prize. homes, more efficient distribution grids, and help bring electricity to A key factor in the Red Electrical Devils’ and the other contending remote areas. teams’ designs was the use of wide-bandgap semiconductors. So Google, with the help of the IEEE Power Electronics Society and Wide-bandgap technology makes it possible for power electronics NREL, laid out a challenge to the world: design a smaller, more to operate at higher voltages and temperatures and transmit more efficient, residential-scale solar power inverter. The team that best energy through a smaller volume. meets all the requirements for the competition would take home a The technical approach documents for the 18 finalists are $1 million prize. publicly available and can be downloaded here: https://www. NREL researchers assisted in the competition by designing the littleboxchallenge.com/. specifications and evaluation methodology for the prototype Watch: Researcher Blake Lundstrom talks about inverters. NREL researchers then evaluated the performance and Can you build a kilowatt-scale efficiency of each inverter at the ESIF, using the same set of typical how NREL helped evaluate inverters for the Google operating conditions. The inverters needed to meet most of the same Little Box Challenge: solar inverter that is smaller specifications required of inverters already available commercially. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CupGG7P33vk. than a tablet (instead of the size of a picnic cooler)? Yes, and you don’t have to compromise on power. | 6 | | 7 | Project Highlights Project Spotlight NREL Evaluates Smart Inverter Functions for Florida NREL Demonstrates That Photovoltaic Systems Large Power and Light and Small Can Provide Grid Services NREL collaborated with Florida Power & Light (FPL) to evaluate various features for a range of smart inverters located at the 1.3-MW solar PV NREL has confirmed that utility-scale PV technologies can provide different power factor settings under a variety of feeder loads and project at the Daytona International Speedway in Daytona Beach, Florida. grid-support functions when needed. NREL teamed up with AES, PV production levels. The research indicates that smart PV inverters NREL provided test data for such advanced inverter functions as fixed Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority, First Solar, and the Electric installed in sufficient quantity at the right location can either shift power factor operation, voltage and frequency ride-through, volt/VAR Reliability Council of Texas to try providing grid ancillary services voltage levels through the use of constant power factor settings or control, and frequency-watt control. NREL also measured the inverters’ using two actual multimegawatt PV power plants. The PV power reduce voltage variability and improve the voltage profile through efficiencies across a wide range of operating