A Clean Locomotive Revolution, Renewable Deployment Setback Ordinances, and Using Water to Cool Supercomputers

Hosts Kerrin Jeromin and Taylor Mankle discuss three recent stories from NREL:   

• All Aboard! NREL Releases First Comprehensive, Open-Source Software for Freight Rail Decarbonization: The rail industry has an opportunity to revolutionize transportation. In the coming years, railroads could lay the tracks for industry-wide net-zero-emissions operations—thanks, in part, to a new software tool from NREL. ALTRIOS, the Advanced Locomotive Technology and Rail Infrastructure Optimization System, is the world's first fully integrated, open-source software designed for exploring deep decarbonization of the rail industry. 
• NREL Analysis Quantifies Impacts of Setback Ordinances on Land Available for Renewable Energy Deployment: The number of local zoning ordinances governing renewable energy deployment is growing in the United States, according to new research by the U.S. Department of Energy’s NREL. The results indicate that local land use and community considerations play a significant role in U.S. decarbonization and should therefore be accurately reflected in modeling and analysis.
• A Decade of Greener Computing Blooms Inside NREL's Data Center: NREL installed its first water-based cooling system inside the Energy Systems Integration Facility­ (ESIF) data center in 2012. That risk paid off, and not just in the $4.05 million operational-cost savings to date. By not relying on air conditioning, the data center has avoided expelling 22,829 metric tons of carbon dioxide over the past 10 years. That is the equivalent of sequestering carbon dioxide emissions from over 25.2 million pounds of coal.

This episode was hosted by Kerrin Jeromin and Taylor Mankle, written and produced by Allison Montroy and Kaitlyn Stottler, and edited by James Wilcox, Joe DelNero, and Brittany Falch. Graphics are by Brittnee Gayet. Our title music is written and performed by Ted Vaca and episode music by Chuck Kurnik, Jim Riley, and Mark Sanseverino of Drift BC. Transforming Energy: The NREL Podcast is created by the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colorado. We express our gratitude and acknowledge that the land we are on is the traditional and ancestral homelands of the Arapaho, Cheyenne, and Ute peoples. Email us at podcast@nrel.gov. Follow NREL on X, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, Threads, and Facebook.

Transcript

[intro music fades] 

Taylor: Welcome to Transforming Energy: The NREL Podcast, brought to you by the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory. We’re highlighting the latest in clean energy research happening at the lab. It’s Wednesday, August 23. I’m Taylor Mankle.

Kerrin: And I’m Kerrin Jeromin. 

Taylor: All aboard! Kerrin, before this episode leaves the station, I’ve got some trivia for you: What was the first coast-to-coast railroad route across the United States? 

Kerrin: The first one?! Let’s see…there’s The Polar Express. The Hogwarts Express. The Little Engine That Could! I’m kidding of course— the Transcontinental Railroad, if memory serves me. 

Taylor: Took a couple stops but you got us there! I love the trip into multiple fictional universes too. 

Kerrin: Don’t worry. I found my way eventually back to the real world, circa 1869. The rail industry has certainly come a long way since that transportation revolution. 

Taylor: No kidding, and in the coming years, railroads could lay the tracks for another revolution in the form of net-zero-emissions operations, thanks in part to a new software tool from NREL called the Advanced Locomotive Technology and Rail Infrastructure Optimization System. 

Kerrin: Okay that’s a mouthful—let’s stick to its acronym, ALTRIOS. This software is designed to help freight rail operators transition to clean locomotive technologies in the most cost-effective ways possible. 

Taylor: Best part? It’s the world’s first fully integrated, open-source software to combine rail and energy storage technology modeling, train dispatching and corridor simulations, and a high-level train scheduling and routing tool into a single, unified model.

Kerrin: That’s incredible. So ALTRIOS works by simulating real-world rail network operations decades into the future. This allows researchers to evaluate which clean-energy technology adoption strategies can help rail operators meet decarbonization targets while keeping operational costs and schedule impacts at a minimum. 

Taylor: The project’s principal investigator was Jason Lustbader, who is a commercial vehicle electrification researcher at NREL shared a little more about ALTRIOS’ capabilities:

Jason Lustbader: “Not only does it give us near-term solutions where we can slowly build in electrification, but it allows you to adjust that to the route, to the needs of the train itself. And you can scale the electrification over time, whether that's a battery-electric locomotive or it's a hydrogen locomotive. You can start as the infrastructure can support it. And as the locomotive technologies are available, you can move towards more electrified, railroad operations.”

Taylor: Historically, transportation is the heaviest-polluting sector of the American economy, so ambitious federal clean energy goals have called for a near-total decarbonization of this sector by 2050. And the continent’s largest freight railroads have also committed to cutting their greenhouse gas emissions 40% by 2030. 

Kerrin: ALTRIOS is already helping to guide these goals. In one application the software is being applied to a freight decarbonization project that is developing autonomous, battery-electric rail cars that travel in groups, but with flexible routes. The goal is to hopefully shift from trucks to rail, which can move freight as much as four times more efficiently. 

Taylor: And it can also be applied to passenger rail transportation. Or potentially adjusted to consider equity and environmental justice concerns like air quality in historically disadvantaged neighborhoods near freight hubs. 

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Kerrin: Taylor, the lab published a pretty interesting press release recently that points to how quickly the adoption of renewable energy technologies is expanding across the country. 

Taylor: It’s a big deal. 

Kerrin: Yeah, the release examines NREL’s ongoing research into the growing number of local zoning ordinances governing renewable energy deployment in the United States. 

Taylor: Yeah, so this research was all about setback ordinances that determine how much land is available for deployment and the amount of wind and solar resources we have to decarbonize our energy system. 

Kerrin: Zoning laws and ordinances on state and local levels are important: They determine how and where new wind and solar projects can be deployed and make sure these projects are sustainably and responsibly developed by establishing standards for noise levels, wind turbine heights, and distances for how close development can happen to property lines, structures, and roads. And they also protect natural habitats, species, and land resources. All very, very important.

Taylor: Past assessments have likely overestimated how much land is available to renewables while also underestimating the cost and challenges of high levels of wind and solar deployment.

Kerrin: NREL’s recent study found that the number of local wind ordinances in effect rose considerably from 286, that’s 2-8-6, in 2018 to 1,853 in 2022. A big increase. And a companion survey found 839 utility-scale solar ordinances in effect in 2022 as well. 

Taylor: So, that’s a lot of figures, but let’s talk about what that means.  According to study author Anthony Lopez, it mostly means that the renewable energy industry is maturing and that it’s important we understand the impacts of renewable development on communities. It also means we can provide information that helps communities develop ordinances balancing impacts of renewable energy development with benefits of deployment.

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Taylor: You know, Kerrin, the world has some pretty iconic duos – Hall and Oates, Mac and cheese, Han Solo and Chewbacca, Peanut butter and jelly, Venus and Serena …I'm just getting started!

Kerrin: Amazing, but you forgot Kerrin and Taylor.  I mean, talk about star-power in those duos! I think I know where you’re going with this power-duo thing. 

Taylor:  It’s the unlikely power duo of water and electricity! Now you may think that’s a bad pairing – and for the most part it is! For day-to-day purposes we definitely don’t want folks thinking otherwise. But back in 2012, advanced-computing experts at NREL made the move to use water to cool central processing units in its data center. 

Kerrin: Yeah. This is really cool. The computing industry understandably had doubts. But as the only Department of Energy lab dedicated to energy-efficiency research, NREL was uniquely positioned to challenge those traditional and energy-intensive methods, like air conditioning, for cooling computers. The lab decided to instead try using water to transfer heat away from data centers.

Taylor: And the risk paid off. NREL’s water-based cooling system has won multiple awards, and the lab has saved more than 4 million dollars in operational costs and avoided releasing 22,829 metric tons of carbon dioxide to date. 

Kerrin: Which is essentially the equivalent of us sequestering C-O-2 emissions from more than 25 million pounds of coal. Incredible. 

Taylor: It’s huge. Now, all this innovation of the past decade has largely happened in the Energy Systems Integration Facility on our main campus in Colorado. 

Kerrin: I attended a tour of that building a few months ago—It was pretty cool to learn that the ESIF, as we like to call the facility, is a LEED-platinum-certified facility. And since 2018, it’s also home to a water-based cooling technology called thermosyphon cooling. 

Taylor: NREL’s supercomputer, that has lived in the ESIF since 2012, produces massive amounts of heat. So, the thermosyphon technique sends that hot water from the data center through a cylindrical container that has a bundle of tubes filled with a refrigerant. The refrigerant then transfers heat away from the water through evaporation. There are automatic controls that vary the fan speed to control the evaporation cycle. And any waste heat is then used to heat NREL’s campus.

Kerrin: So awesome. I challenge you to think of a better example of reduce, reuse, recycle! NREL partnered with Johnson Controls and Sandia National Labs to deploy this on the roof of the ESIF, and since this form of evaporative cooling was installed, NREL has saved more than 6.5 million, million, gallons of water. 

Taylor: To help quantify that number: The amount of water the thermosyphon saved in just its first two years could have filled three Olympic-sized pools. Or a different example, a typical data center needs to dedicate 70% of its energy consumption to the task of keeping it cool and within ten years, NREL has dropped that to 3%. Not just for the data center but the whole ESIF building! 

Kerrin: Of course, the laboratory’s pursuit of energy-efficient computing is not complete. 

Taylor: In March 2022, NREL partnered with the Joint Institute for Strategic Energy Analysis to launch its Green Computing Catalyzer to explore data center efficiency, the waste cycle of computers and materials, and how to improve and measure the energy consumption of algorithms.

Kerrin: And of course, we can’t forget the recent installation of our Kestrel supercomputer, built by Hewlitt Packard Enterprises. I got a sneak peek in my tour of the ESIF! 

Taylor: Same here Kerrin! I got a good look at it when Secretary Granholm visited campus a couple months back. And Kestrel, named for the falcon known for keen eyesight and intelligence, will continue to support NREL’s journey to net-zero-lab status. 

[interstitial music] 

Taylor: Kerrin, before we wrap up, as the resident vegetarian, I wanted to wish you a happy national Cuban sandwich day! 

Kerrin: Happy National Cuban Sandwich Day to you too, Taylor!  For those of you super confused, go back and listen to our last episode – and join the celebration with me!

Taylor: Thanks for listening to this week’s episode! Now that we’ve been doing this for a couple of months, we’d love to hear from you—tell us what you think by emailing podcast@nrel.gov or leaving a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

Kerrin: We would love five stars if possible. And of course, don’t forget to subscribe on your favorite streaming platform so you never miss an episode!

Taylor: We’ll be back in two weeks with more news from NREL. 

[interstitial music]

Kerrin: This episode was adapted from NREL news articles from August 2023 authored by Brooke Van Zandt, Wayne Hicks, and Anna Squires. Our theme music is written and performed by Ted Vaca and episode music by Chuck Kurnik, Jim Riley, and Mark Sanseverino, of Drift BC. This podcast is produced by NREL’s Communications Office and recorded at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Colorado. We express our gratitude and acknowledge that the land we are on is the traditional and ancestral homelands of the Arapaho, Cheyenne, and Ute peoples We recognize and pay respect to the Indigenous peoples from our past, present, and future, and are grateful to those who have and continue to be stewards of this land.  

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