Possible Pathways to 100% Renewable Energy in Puerto Rico, the Wind Workforce Gap, and an NREL Leader Honored—Plus, How Research Gets Published

This episode discusses three recent stories from NREL:  

1.  In 2017, Puerto Rico faced a devastating double blow as consecutive hurricanes decimated 80% of its electrical grid, resulting in the longest blackout in U.S. history. Determined to rebuild resiliently, Puerto Rico passed Act 17 in 2019, aiming for a 100% renewable energy system by 2050, which sparked the groundbreaking PR100 study—a collaborative effort between the Department of Energy and six national laboratories—to chart the territory's energy future through extensive community engagement and innovative scenarios.
2. With the U.S. wind energy sector projected to grow substantially, a new NREL report highlights a potential shortage of over 124,000 workers by 2030, emphasizing the need for collaborative efforts to raise awareness, increase training opportunities, create connections, and emphasize inclusivity in the wind energy workforce. We delve into the report's findings and discuss actionable steps to bridge the wind workforce gap, essential for realizing America's clean energy future.
3. Nancy Haegel, Director of the National Center for Photovoltaics at NREL, has been elected as a fellow of the AAAS, recognized for her distinguished contributions to materials science, particularly in semiconductor transport, infrared detectors, and renewable energy. She is the 12th person from NREL to receive this prestigious honor.

Plus: NREL librarian Jason Youngstrom joins to discuss the essential role of NREL librarians, who play a crucial part in advancing renewable energy research by ensuring NREL researchers have access to the latest information and publications needed to drive innovation and maintain NREL's position as a leader in the field. 

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]  

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, May 15. I’m Kerrin Jeromin. 

Taylor: And I’m Taylor Mankle and boy, do we have a jam-packed episode, including a special guest today, Kerrin!

Kerrin: Yes, we do! In today’s episode, we’re talking about scenarios for Puerto Rico to get to a 100% renewable energy system; how we close the wind energy workforce gap; and we’re welcoming NREL librarian, Jason Youngstrom, back to the sound booth to talk about the lab’s research resources.  

Taylor: Packed with so many good things. Let’s dive right in!  

[music]  

Kerrin: In 2017, Puerto Rico was hit by back-to-back hurricanes that destroyed about 80% of Puerto Rico's electrical grid. That resulted in the longest blackout in U.S. history—taking 328 days to get power fully restored. A record that no one wanted to break.  

Taylor: Definitely not. Maritere Padilla-Rodriguez, Director of Policy and Advocacy with the Hispanic Federation in Puerto Rico, shares more about the impacts.  

Padilla-Rodriguez: After Hurricane Maria, we lost more than 3,000 lives during the longest blackout of U.S. history. Those are too many lives. That cannot happen again. 

Taylor: And in 2019, the people of Puerto Rico made it clear that this cannot happen again. That’s when Act 17 was passed, committing to reach a 100% renewable energy system by 2050 – one that is resilient, reliable, and affordable.   

Kerrin: And that’s where PR100 comes in. The Puerto Rico Grid Resilience and Transitions to 100% Renewable Energy Study, or PR100, leveraged researchers across six U.S. Department of Energy national laboratories, including NREL, which led the study.  

Taylor: The purpose of PR100 was to identify possible pathways for Puerto Rico to reach its 2050 100% renewable goal. However, PR100 is not only a reflection of world-class, in-depth modeling and analysis by researchers, it’s also a reflection of years of engagement with local stakeholders who hold a diversity of perspectives. 

Jennifer Granholm: Over the past year, I’ve visited communities across Puerto Rico, listening to residents’ visions for what a cleaner and more resilient energy future could look like. Now, PR100 is ready to help make them bring those visions to life. 

Kerrin: That was Department of Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm. The PR100 team knew that Puerto Rico's priorities needed to drive research activities, so the team partnered with the Hispanic Federation in Puerto Rico throughout the study to advise on and facilitate the stakeholder engagement strategy. This included visits to communities across Puerto Rico and roundtables with local businesses, the agricultural sector, people with disabilities, workforce experts, and philanthropists. 

Taylor: This in-depth community engagement and input allowed researchers to define various scenarios, that they would then use computer modeling, to visualize and understand potential outcomes—all of this based on Puerto Rico’s local priorities. Those priorities include energy access and affordability; reliability and resilience; siting, land use, environmental and health effects; and finally, economic and workforce development. Resilience—provided by highly distributed energy generation and storage —was also a top priority.  

Kerrin: NREL and the other national laboratories centered those priorities in the renewable energy technology analysis and came up with three scenarios for a successful future energy system.  

Taylor: Right. And each of the three scenarios focuses on different degrees of solar energy incorporation across Puerto Rico, like prioritizing hospitals or remote households versus installing solar and battery energy storage on any and all suitable rooftops available. The scenarios answer questions about trade-offs between a highly distributed energy system and a more centralized one.

Kerrin: Overall, there’s a lot of investment to bring the grid and transmission network up to par before any significant energy generation (renewable or otherwise) can be added. Many stakeholders see widespread adoption of solar and battery energy storage as a pathway to saving lives in a future where hurricanes are projected to be more intense. Even with widespread adoption of distributed solar and storage, all PR100 scenarios also include utility-scale solar and storage to ensure that demand can be met reliably. There’s a lot of work to do to make it a reality, and there’s no time to lose.   

Taylor: Exactly. PR100 contains one foremost conclusion: While it is technically feasible for Puerto Rico to transition to 100% renewable energy by 2050, significant system upgrades and investments—guided by meaningful community participation—are needed.  

[music]  

Kerrin: Taylor, you know, I think a really exciting part of our nation’s energy transition that can get easily overlooked, is job creation. 

Taylor: Oh, yeah.

Kerrin: Yeah! We have to have a trained workforce to meet our clean energy goals.  

Taylor: No doubt. And a new NREL study estimates that by 2030, we’re going to need more than a quarter million workers in wind energy alone. 

Kerrin: Wow.

Taylor: But at the current pace we’re adding wind energy workers to our workforce, we won’t meet that demand.  

Kerrin: Hmm. So how do we get more people connected to jobs, is the question. The study found four key areas we need to focus on to narrow the wind workforce gap. First, something we’re doing right now, that’s raise awareness.  

Taylor: Yeah, it seems obvious but it’s the first step to getting people interested. Industry and educational and training institutions should collaborate to provide relevant coursework and build awareness of wind energy industry job opportunities among students.  

Kerrin: That’s right. The second focus area is to increase training opportunities. Industry firms and educational institutions should increase and establish internships and apprenticeship programs and pipelines, which give students the technical skills they need to gain wind energy industry employment.  

Taylor: Third, create connections. That’s one NREL is good at! To help meet the growing demand for trained wind energy workers, industry members can connect with future workers through workforce training programs like the NREL-managed U.S. Department of Energy’s Collegiate Wind Competition, which provides participating students with real-world wind energy experience. 

Kerrin: And finally, emphasize inclusivity. Industry firms and educational and training institutions should build partnerships with community-based organizations focused on diversity, equity, and inclusion to help make wind energy careers more accessible to a broader and more diverse workforce. 

Taylor: So now we’ve got the keys to go out and get more folks trained and in wind energy jobs! And one of the beauties of this work is these focus areas could also apply to most any clean energy technology jobs… and we’re going to need it to get America’s workforce ready for our clean energy future. 

[music]  

Kerrin: Today, we’ve got NREL Librarian Jason Youngstrom in the sound booth with us. Jason, welcome back, my friend!  

Jason: Thanks so much, Kerrin, Taylor.  

Taylor: It’s great to see you, Jason. Tell us, what do you have today?  

Jason: So, I’d like to take a step back today and talk about the role of the library and of Librarians at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. 

Taylor: Love it.

Jason: People are sometimes surprised to learn that I am a Librarian, and they want to know more about what I do. 

Taylor: Same here, Jason. Tell us and our audience, you know, what makes you different than, maybe, uh, my public librarian I remember from back in the day? 

Jason: Yeah, so, librarians at national laboratories have slightly different roles than a public or an academic librarian. Personally, I think I have the best library job there is, because every day I play an important role in advancing the NREL mission, and I do it by cleaning up metadata. With that set up, you know this is going to be the most riveting podcast segment yet! 

Taylor: I am officially intrigued; metadata is a huge part of our success. Tell us more.

Jason: So seriously, you all know that the information landscape is more complicated than ever. On one hand information is available online at any time, and on the other hand, paywalls are ubiquitous and actually getting to the “available” information can take a lot of work. And that’s what I and the other NREL librarians do. We do the work in the back end, so when an NREL researcher is looking for a journal paper online, they can get it. 

So that’s the information foundation, but there’s more to it. Our mission at the NREL Library is to get the NREL researchers the information they need when they need it, and most often that information goes beyond simply getting a paper. We’re the first stop for any research project, because we deliver answers. Things like optical methods to measure deposition thickness or the melting point of a specific compound.  

This is where Scientific Publishing comes in. At a National Laboratory like NREL, publishing is an integral part of what we do. NREL Scientists publish in peer reviewed journals, present at conferences, produce technical reports, and lots more. NREL has published more than 53,000 publications, but according to one metric, have been sited over 800,000 times. That’s a lot. And we take the publishing part of our work very seriously.   

Any researcher seeking to publish needs to make sure they check a few boxes: First, they need to meet NREL’s high scientific standards. Second, they need to get the information to the right audience. And finally, the publication needs to have all the right information tied to it so it can be found.  All this work goes into our publications so you, dear listener, get the top-quality research and analysis that you expect from NREL.  

Throughout NREL’s history, we have produced some of the most influential works in renewable energy. From the annual solar cell efficiency tables, now on their 63rd version, to the LA100 and PR100 reports that detail community driven paths for Los Angeles and Puerto Rico to reach their 100% renewable energy goals. NREL prides itself on producing high quality research and analysis, and to ensure that, our publications go through a rigorous vetting process. Publications in peer reviewed journals are reviewed by subject experts as part of the journal editing process. For other publications, NREL has an internal peer review, where two subject experts, who are not involved in the paper examine each publication for quality and accuracy.   

Given the solid foundation of literature research from the library, the hard work of NREL researchers, and the internal review process, you can be sure that the science coming out of NREL is befitting of the United States’ foremost renewable energy laboratory. 

And I like to think that my work as a Librarian, lays the cornerstone for that foundation. 

Kerrin: I’d have to agree. Thanks so much Jason for sharing insight into the important work of the NREL Library.

[music] 

Kerrin: Woo - what an episode, huh Taylor?  

Taylor: Oh, absolutely. And let’s end with a shout out for a fantastic NRELian.  

Kerrin: Let’s do it! Nancy Haegel has been elected as a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, or Triple A-S.   

Taylor: Nancy is the director of the National Center for Photovoltaics at NREL and is the 12th person at the lab to receive this honor. Triple A-S is a global scientific society known for publishing the journal Science. 

Taylor: Congratulations! A well-deserved honor.  

Kerrin: That’s what we got for you today, friends, thank you so much for joining us for another episode of Transforming Energy: The NREL Podcast. If you liked this one, be sure to subscribe and leave us a review!  

Taylor: You can drop us an email and let us know what you think of the show…give us a shout at podcast@nrel.gov. Thanks, listeners, and we’ll be back in two weeks with more news from the lab. 

[music] 

Kerrin: This episode was adapted from NREL news articles from April 2024 written by Brooke Van Zandt, Carol Laurie, and Wayne Hicks. Special thanks to correspondent Jason Youngstrom. 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.