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Kerrin: 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 and innovations happening at the lab. It’s Wednesday, November 1st. November 1st, Taylor. I’m Kerrin Jeromin.
Taylor: I’m Taylor Mankle.
Kerrin: Taylor, you look different since last episode. You have that marriage glow!
Taylor: All the smiles! Thank you so much. I think it suits me well. Getting used to the ring and everything.
Kerrin: Good for you! You haven’t lost it yet?
Taylor: Not yet. Not yet.
Kerrin: That’s good. Don’t do that. Yeah, okay. It’s been a really exciting week, of course Halloween went by. Did you go as anything special?
Taylor: Ah, nothing crazy. Nothing crazy. A couple of different costumes for different parties. I feel like that’s almost required these days, having your options open for Halloween.
Kerrin: Yeah, we’re in Colorado and the weather can change in an instant as many places. So, I too had multiple outfits. Today, I’m rocking the sweater weather, sweater weather outfit. So, let’s dive in today. We’ve got four stories to cover in today’s episode.
Taylor: Let’s do it!
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Kerrin: Taylor, are you ready to unleash the grid edge?
Taylor: Oh, yes, I am! I’m also ready for that to be the tag line of the next big, epic spy movie!
Kerrin: Yeah, I did my best movie voice there. And the secret weapon everyone is after in this movie apparently, is none other than NREL’s Advanced Distribution Management System test bed.
Taylor: I’ve already got my tickets pre-ordered and popcorn bucket at the ready. But back to reality, the Advanced Distribution Management System, or ADMS, test bed is a real blockbuster-sized asset. Renewable energy is shaping the power system, especially at the end of the distribution line —also known as the grid edge.
Kerrin: The grid edge.
Taylor: We’ve talked about the grid edge in previous episodes, but a refresher on what that means, the grid-edge is the point where we connect to the network, or where electricity reaches our homes and businesses. And now as customers are adding rooftop solar, electric vehicles, and other devices on to the grid, the ADMS Test Bed will help utilities answer important questions.
Kerrin: Right. Questions like how dozens of electric vehicles charging simultaneously from one building might impact grid performance, or how extra power from a rooftop solar panel could be shared with nearby homes.
Taylor: Exactly, and it helps answer these questions by providing utilities with everything they need to model and evaluate their desired distribution systems. Think of it like a sandbox for researchers and utilities to play in before making any adjustments to the actual grid. Things like grid simulators, renewable energy generators, megawatt-scale distribution equipment, and electric system experts. All of these together allow utilities and grid management software vendors to test and validate big investments and products.
Kerrin: These could be things like private communication networks for utility devices, or residential buildings that provide energy services.
Taylor: And, with the buildout of NREL’s Advanced Research on Integrated Energy Systems platform—
Kerrin: Hold on! There’s an acronym for that, we definitely know that. ARIES! We’ve heard this one before.
Taylor: Absolutely! And with ARIES, Test Bed users have access to 20 megawatts of hardware including solar panels, hydrogen electrolyzers, and battery energy systems. Plus, NREL’s cyber range can be integrated so users can also track potential for cyberattacks.
Kerrin: All of which allow for closer-to-reality experiments, so utilities and partners can test things in a controlled environment, at scale, risk free, before the system is ever developed.
Taylor: And while we might have jokingly called the ADMS Test Bed a secret weapon, that’s actually not the case. The door is always open for new projects, for utilities, and for NREL partners to leverage its capabilities. The laboratory also recently reopened applications for users to propose Test Bed projects.
Kerrin: The Test Bed user call is seeking proposals from utilities, cooperatives, energy technologies companies, and any other research partner seeking to address the challenges of integrating more electric vehicles and the electricity they require into the power system. Applications are open at nrel.gov/aries, that’s A-R-I-E-S until December 1st.
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Taylor: For our next story, let’s dive into the wonderful world of wave energy!
Kerrin: Take it away, my water power friend.
Taylor: Now, if someone inquires about the cost comparison of a semi-taut spread or a catenary weight-float, don’t worry, you haven’t accidentally walked into a sphinx’s riddle.
Kerrin: I think I did.
Taylor: You’ve probably just found yourself in the middle of a U.S. Department of Energy Water Power Technologies Office-funded study on mooring systems.
Kerrin: Gotcha! I’m not sure about those other things you mentioned, but I know about mooring systems –those keep ships, buoys, and other floating objects from drifting away in the waves. They’re important for keeping devices where you want them and prevent them from bumping into anything. And this study’s goal was to find the most cost-effective way to acquire mooring systems for a new wave energy test site off the coast of Oregon.
Taylor: Exactly right! The site, called the PacWave South test site, plans to open to wave energy technology developers in 2025. They’ll be able to test wave energy converter prototypes in actual ocean waves—an essential step to determining whether devices that turn ocean waves into electricity can weather our active ocean conditions.
Kerrin: Very cool. So, here’s the big issue that this study is trying to solve: No two wave energy converters are the same, so that means no single mooring system can serve all the prototypes at the test site.
Taylor: Each company, in theory, could just buy its own mooring system. But that would be expensive and inefficient. Why spend all that money for just one test?
Kerrin: Stein Housner and Senu Sirnivas are two researchers at NREL who set out, along with colleagues at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, which is located in Washington state, to determine what kind of generic mooring systems could get the job done at the most cost-effective price. They were able to narrow it from 43 mooring designs to a solution that included one mooring system for each of the four anchoring areas at the PacWave South site.
Taylor: And now, it’s up to the Water Power Technologies office and PacWave to decide how to proceed with Houser and Sirnivas’ recommendations.
Kerrin: Okay, but, Taylor, I’m still wondering what semi-taut spreads and catenary weight-floats are.
Taylor: Yeah, we had to get back to that. It’s pure gibberish. No, just kidding, just kidding—they are actually types of mooring systems. The catenary system is a relatively slack mooring that uses the weight of the line (typically made of chain) to control movement and a semi-taut spread system is a combination of mooring lines that use the line’s weight and elasticity to control movement. These lines are typically made of chain near the anchor and synthetic rope near the device. And in case you were wondering, the semi-taut spread is cheaper.
Kerrin: Okay, I think I followed along. You taught me something there. But you know what? I still think a semi-taut spread is something that sounds delicious on toast, and I’ll leave it at that. But let’s move forward.
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Kerrin: So, NREL collaborates a lot with other organizations and companies, but there’s a new collaboration that is particularly exciting because it’s focused on lithium-ion battery recycling.
Taylor: The batteries that give electric vehicles life! Currently, the most eco-friendly battery designs are also the least profitable to recycle. It’s a tough and important problem.
Kerrin: Yes. But a new collaboration between NREL and ACE Green Recycling is working to develop and optimize recycling techniques that will bridge the gap between sustainability and profitability for lithium iron phosphate, or LFP, batteries as they’re called.
Taylor: Historically, automakers favored NMC, or lithium nickel manganese cobalt oxide batteries.
Kerrin: Say that three times fast! We’ll just go with NMC batteries. These NMC batteries use expensive and supply-constrained critical materials like cobalt, nickel, and lithium that of course, no secret, have caused concerns about availability, ethical sourcing, and cost.
Matt Keyser: Right now, we can't mine enough nickel, cobalt, manganese for all the batteries that are anticipated to have in the future. So, we need to look at all sources of those transition metals. And so, what we're doing is we're looking at getting batteries, recycling them, and then recovering those transmission transition metals so they can be utilized in future lithium chemistries.
Taylor: That was Matt Keyser, the electrochemical energy storage group manager at NREL. As Keyser said, the demand for battery materials is just too much to keep up with. Now, many automakers have recently switched to LFP batteries, which don’t contain cobalt or nickel.
Kerrin: This has marked a huge shift. In 2020, LFP batteries made up only 6% of the lithium-ion battery market. But in 2022, that number jumped to 27%.
Taylor: Wow! What a jump. Unfortunately, that shift also creates challenges for battery recyclers. Different battery types have different recycling needs, and combining these technologies into the same recycling stream can cause issues.
Matt Keyser: Recycling of lithium-ion batteries is fairly difficult. And the primary reason is, is because there's not one lithium battery. I think that there is a concept out there that there is just one lithium battery, but that's not true. The battery in a cell phone is lithium, cobalt oxide versus graphite. The batteries in advanced vehicles is a nickel cobalt manganese oxide versus a graphite. So, there's a lot of different battery technologies out there. And because of that, when you take a battery and you put it into a recycling stream, you're going to be mixing all those different battery technologies together. And that actually is going to cause contamination. So that's not good. And that makes it difficult to be able to recycle batteries in the future.
Kerrin: That definitely sounds like a challenge. Also, because recyclers target high-value critical materials like cobalt and nickel for extraction, lithium iron phosphate, again, that’s LFP, batteries are less likely to be recycled than NMC batteries. Together, NREL and ACE hope to demonstrate economic recycling methods for materials in LFP batteries.
Taylor: NREL will use its capabilities in cell production, modeling, and analysis to assist ACE in evaluating commercialization of their propriety LFP recycling technology—all to maximize performance and lifetime requirements of these batteries.
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Kerrin: Okay, our final story this episode, you might need a little popcorn and water for this one, because it is heavy, but it’s really interesting stuff. We focus on energy storage, specifically, energy storage with more than four hours. Energy storage is just as it sounds: Storing energy for later use – like storing power created generated by solar panels to use when the sun is not shining. Now, why study storage that is longer than four hours you might ask?
Taylor: Yeah, four hours that is a very exact number of hours of storage. But the reason is that more than 90% of lithium-ion batteries deployed in the U.S. in recent years have been for four hours. That’s because it works well for hot summer days when peak demand is shorter and there’s lots of solar energy to supplement demand. Markets even incentivize four-hour storage.
Kerrin: That means if you have a six-hour battery, you don’t bring in any more revenue than a four-hour battery. So, there’s really no incentive. You might be wondering why we even care about longer duration storage. Well, the thing is there is a lot of value for the power grid in storage with more than four hours. NREL worked on a multiyear study, called the Storage Futures Study, that looked at the role of energy storage in a resilient, flexible, and low-carbon U.S. power grid through the year 2050. The study found there is potential for hundreds of gigawatts of storage with at least six hours, mostly because it can help integrate lots of wind and solar onto the grid. In a new report, NREL returned to the Storage Futures Study to dig into the question of how we go from storage being a minor player in today’s energy landscape to the major league of future energy systems.
Taylor: NREL found the value of four-hour-plus storage could increase because of, drumroll… winter demand. As extreme weather conditions increase and we electrify more building heating systems, peak demand is becoming more significant in winter than in summer. And demand peaks in winter also tend to be longer—like at night when solar-powered energy isn’t available.
Kerrin: Makes sense. As we continue to rely more and more on solar for power, the shift to net winter peaks will speed up in most of the country. It’s already happening already in multiple regions, like the Southeast and Texas. And this transition only makes longer-duration storage development more necessary to help keep the lights on all winter long.
Taylor: I want to mention an interesting connection here, because we were just talking about lithium-ion batteries. According to Paul Denholm, who is a senior research fellow at NREL, other storage technologies able that can meet winter demand peaks could compete with lithium-ion technology in terms of cost and service lifetimes. So, lithium-ion may not always be the dominant player.
Kerrin: That is interesting. New players coming in here. It all comes down to grid reliability, really—and greater storage is what will get us there!
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Taylor: Before we go, we wanted to quickly recognize NREL’s Phil Parilla, who joined NREL in 1990 and has worked in the hydrogen storage group for more than 20 years. Parilla was just named a fellow of the American Physical Society.
Kerrin: Congratulations, that is a super big deal. The 124-year-old organization honored Parilla for—and I’ll just quote them here— his “outstanding contributions to hydrogen absorption science, for contributions to the physics and advanced materials characterization of new energy-related materials, and for exemplary leadership and mentorship.”
Taylor: What an honor. Very few American Physical Society members are named fellows—no more than a half of a percent of its members annually. But Parilla is in good company—he’s joining 10 other NREL researchers who have been named fellows in the past.
Kerrin: Congratulations, Phil! That’s amazing. And thanks everyone for joining us for yet another episode of Transforming Energy: The NREL Podcast. Made it to November. We’ll be back in two weeks with more news from NREL.
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Taylor: This episode was adapted from NREL articles from October 2023 authored by Connor O’Neil, Justin Daugherty, Madeline Geocaris, Rebecca Martineau, Caitlin McDermott-Murphy, and Wayne Hicks. Our theme music is written and performed by Ted Vaca, and episode music by Chuck Kurnik, Jim Riley, and Mark Sanseverino, of Drift B-C. 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 been and continue to be stewards of this land.
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