US Forest Service Goes Green, the Cost of Owning Zero-Emission Vehicles, ARIES Depicts Real-World Energy Systems

In this week’s episode, your hosts dive into a few real-world applications of NREL’s research, including:

• Boosting Energy Efficiency on the Front Lines of Wildfire Control: through a partnership with the U.S. Forest Service, NREL introduced solar power and battery storage solutions to wildfire basecamps, paving the way for quieter, cleaner, and more efficient firefighting support.
• Decoding Zero-Emission Vehicle Costs: Now available for public use, NREL's T3CO tool helps owners of commercial vehicle fleets evaluate and transition to zero-emission vehicles with greater confidence, simplifying complex cost calculations to boost sustainable commercial transportation.
• Simulating Real-World Energy Solutions with ARIES: From tackling grid challenges to conducting live cyberattack simulations, NREL's ARIES platform allows researchers to simulate complex real-world grid conditions, transforming the way researchers analyze renewable energy solutions.

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

[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, November 13th. I’m Kerrin Jeromin. 

Taylor: And I’m Taylor Mankle.  

Kerrin: We’ve got three stories to share with you this week, and while they cover a variety of different topics—they all kind of have the same takeaway: NREL’s research being used in real-life applications to build a more sustainable future.

Taylor: Love that. Starting with something we are all too familiar with here in Colorado, and many parts of the American west: that’s wildfires.  

Kerrin: Yes, you may recall in July of this year the Lake Fire in Santa Barbara County very quickly became one of the biggest wildfires of the year in California.  

Taylor: It grew to 28,000 acres in the first five days and took more than a month to contain.  

Kerrin: A month and 3,500 firefighting personnel. When you think about the fact that it was only one of thousands of wildfires in California this year, it’s hard to fathom the number of resources and people needed each year to battle these wildfires.  

Taylor: When a wildfire threatens communities, wildland firefighters from all over the United States come together to mitigate its impact on ecosystems and prevent it from approaching spreading into areas where people live and work.  

Kerrin: This means that much of the staging and preparation made by wildland firefighters often happens in remote areas with limited access to resources and supplies needed to sustain thousands of trained personnel.  

Taylor: While it might be logistically challenging, deploying wildland firefighter basecamps closer to the fire, and farther away from urban areas, also allows firefighters to more easily fight wildfires at their source and keep communities safe. 

Kerrin: But, of course, there are challenges around supplying those isolated camps. 

Taylor: The biggest being fuel for power.  

Kerrin: Absolutely. Traditional gas and diesel generators have been the go-to solution for electricity, and water, and communications.  

Taylor: But they’re noisy, need to be refueled often, and you guessed it—they’re not exactly great for the planet. Plus, they’re expensive: it costs the US Forest Service about $8 million a year just to run generators in fire camps.  

Kerrin: And to compare, that amount of diesel fuel would power 4,000 passenger cars for a year.  

Taylor: Wow. During the Lake Fire, NREL worked with the Department of Agriculture and US Forest Services’ Greening Fire Team to pilot several renewable energy solutions—like integrating solar power and battery energy storage solutions into fire camp operations.  

Kerrin: Manuel Perez with US Forest Service said one of the things that made this firecamp a good place to test and study renewable energy solutions was the sheer size of the fire.  

Manuel: At the height of the fire this camp supported 3500 people. To put that in context, the city of Buellton is a little over 5000 people in population.  

Taylor: Wow, the resources and personnel required to fight these monstrous fires really is like a popup, portable city. 

Manuel: One of the main reasons why we’re out here is to safeguard these natural resources out in the forest and a big part of that is being mindful of our footprint here in camp. We brought with us a data logger to see how much is being used throughout the camp. We're also monitoring specific devices like laptops computers monitors. One of the advantages of solar panels is that they have lower emissions compared to these diesel generators, as well as cut down in noise and overall improve the air quality in firecamp.  

Kerrin: Camp leaders were able to more efficiently power office trailers, light towers, and toilets and bring critical command and control systems online quickly. 

Taylor: New types of solar panels allowed the Lake Fire basecamp to be more energy independent, with solar cells performing well even in smoky conditions.  

Kerrin: And additional access to batteries also ensured allowed longer runtimes to supplement any drops in power supply. 

Taylor: I think we should note here that this isn’t NREL’s first time working with the Greening Fire Team—which has a goal of achieving net-zero environmental impact on all large fire incidents by 2030.

Kerrin: And they’ve been working with NREL researchers for 20 years to achieve this. Expertise from NREL has helped make the adoption of renewable energy infrastructure within fire camps a systematic process, with more effective guidance and management systems becoming available to administrators and fireteam leaders.

Taylor: Both NREL and the US Forest Service believe that sustainable wildland firefighting methods can both increase effectiveness of firefighting practices and decrease the human footprint in remote wilderness areas.  

Manuel:  As our fire season grows to be year-round, we’ve moved from fighting a sprint to fighting a marathon and we need to make sure our resources we use to power this firecamp and all the supporting resources can do so reliability and sustainably. 

[music]  

Taylor: OK, so we talked about sustainable solutions for agencies working in remote areas, but what about in more populated areas—like a congested roadway?  

Kerrin: Yes: this next story is all about zero-emission vehicles, or ZEVs—and a handy tool from NREL that is helping commercial vehicle owners do the math on how to best transition their fleets from diesel to ZEV. Before we get into the details, let’s explain what a ZEV is.

Taylor: Good call. A ZEV is a vehicle that produces no tailpipe emissions – or has the potential to produce none. So that means EVs, plug-in hybrid EVs, and hydrogen fuel cell vehicles. And there’s a lot to gain from the transition to ZEVs—they have lower maintenance and energy costs, potential for generous tax credits and rebates, and can save businesses money in the long run.  

Kerrin: But they’re also a lot less standardized than diesel’s ‘one size fits most’ solution for commercial fleets, so the total cost of ownership can change depending on things like the size of the battery, the price of electricity, or the time it takes to recharge batteries.  

Taylor: Right, so understandably, it can leave businesses and manufacturers scratching their heads at what vehicles they should be selecting and how much it’s really going to cost.  

Kerrin: NREL researchers have released a new version of the Transportation Technology Total Cost of Ownership tool—which we call T3CO. It’s the most sophisticated open-source commercial vehicle total cost of ownership tool out there today.  

Taylor: OK, so it’s got a cool name, but what does this actually do for folks?  

Kerrin: Yeah, good question, right? T3CO enables fast analyses that can provide comprehensive insights into the life-cycle costs of decarbonized vehicles. And as fleets worldwide accelerate their transitions to electric vehicles, T3CO can guide cost-effective purchasing decisions. 

Taylor: NREL’s been using T3CO internally for many years. But now, the rebuilt version is available to the public as an open-source tool. It is fast, it’s user-friendly, —and it’s free.  

Kerrin: T3CO can help users decide if a hybrid, battery-electric, or hydrogen fuel cell is the best type of vehicle for their needs, it can identify the best battery size and find the best cost for individual ZEV components to be cost-competitive with conventional vehicles.  

Taylor: It can also figure out the total cost of ownership using real-world data on how vehicles are being operated. And it can help owners phase in ZEVs into their fleets in the most effective way for them.

Kerrin: The tool breaks costs into three categories: capital—or upfront costs, like taxes and purchasing a vehicle; operating costs, like maintenance, insurance, refueling or recharging; and finally, opportunity costs—the soft expenses like the amount of productivity lost in the time vehicles are charging.  

Taylor: It’s that last category that makes this tool so unique. T3CO can capture not just the typical use but the full variety of operations a vehicle might need to perform over a life cycle and calculate its cost accordingly. 

Kerrin: It’s some seriously complex math, you know? Some of us kind of shy away from that. Which, luckily, is NREL’s specialty. And the easy-to-use tools that emerge from these complex challenges help accelerate the transition to a clean energy future.  

[music]  

Taylor: Let’s wrap this episode up with ARIES— and no, we’re not pivoting to horoscope readings or even talking about constellations here.  

Kerrin: This story is about NREL’s ARIES platform, which we’ve definitely chatted about before. Bonus points if you remember the acronym, but in case you forgot: ARIES stands for Advanced Research on Integrated Energy systems.  

Taylor: ARIES has been online for five years now, and in this platform, researchers are able to replicate obstacles to renewable energy generation—things like lack of energy storage, cybersecurity threats, and electrical instabilities. All to vet large-scale energy solutions in action.

Kerrin: Like constellations that once guided explorers, ARIES helps users orient their clean energy decisions. It helps them explore the biggest challenges to the clean energy transition.  

Taylor: Which is a major thing, considering that renewable energy generation today supplies 22% of the country’s electricity. And we’re integrating many diverse technologies into the grid—things like solar and wind—which adds another layer of challenges for clean energy.  

Kerrin: Yeah! So, engineers need to be able to do experiments that will help them find detailed solutions—they need to be able to customize electricity scenarios to recreate the big research questions.  

Taylor: That’s a top research goal of ARIES – to successfully integrate diverse technologies. And there’s a number of ways it’s achieving that.  

Kerrin: Its controllable grid interface can recreate any grid scenario—customizing configurations for things like wind and solar power generation. It quadrupled in power capacity this year, which is incredible, to support more project work, and now allows researchers to use two machines in the same experiment—basically opening the door for more customized, detailed experimentation.  

Taylor: As modern organizations face a daily barrage of cyberattacks and scams, the situation is similarly problematic for energy systems. NREL’s cyber researchers utilize the ARIES Cyber Range to study cyberattacks on energy systems.

Kerrin: OK so here is a real example of this in action: researchers used the ARIES platform to stage a cyberattack on—get this—one of our own wind turbines on our Flatirons Campus in Colorado in front of a live audience of industry professionals.

Taylor: I remember this! In seconds, NREL's mock attackers reduced the plant production to zero, cutting power to thousands of people—and showcasing what consequences could occur if vulnerabilities are left unpatched in energy systems. 

Kerrin: To clarify, thousands of people didn’t actually lose power. It was just in the simulation. But in doing this, researchers showed the usefulness of ARIES tools in highlighting and addressing those vulnerabilities that could lead to a real cyberattack situation not unlike this one.  

[music]  

Taylor: Here we are again, the end of another episode. But don’t worry folks, we’ve got more coming for you soon, including another Lab Notes episode coming next week that dives into the world of agrivoltaics.

Kerrin: Yes, this one’s going to be a good one! You’ll want to listen in for that one. In agrivoltaics, we’re harvesting some agriculture and photovoltaic knowledge right before Thanksgiving. Thanks for joining us today, and don’t forget you can reach us anytime at podcast@nrel.gov.  

[music]   

 Taylor: This episode was adapted from NREL news articles from October 2024 written by Anna Squires, Anton Moledietsky, and Connor O’Neil. 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 of our past, present, and future, and are grateful to those who have been and continue to be stewards of this land.