Category: Renewable Energy

Source: US National Renewable Energy Laboratory

Partnership With Xcel Energy Reveals Solutions To Meet Needs of and Avoid Unnecessary Expenses for Grid Customers

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As demand for electricity in the United States grows and evolves, utilities need to continually analyze whether distribution infrastructure is up to the task. Strain on the power grid can risk transformer overloads and power outages and result in higher electricity costs if growing demand is not addressed—requiring utilities to make decisions balancing reliability, safety, and cost considerations.

Research conducted by the National Laboratory of the Rockies (NLR) for large public-utility company Xcel Energy sought to identify solutions to mitigate costly grid upgrades by applying algorithms to balance electric loads in a way that preserves the same level of service and manages costs. While there are numerous drivers of electric load growth including data centers and artificial intelligence (AI), Xcel Energy noticed an increasing number of their customers were purchasing electric vehicles, triggering their need to plan for solutions that minimize and potentially even reverse adverse impacts of increased power demand by leveraging load flexibility.

Xcel Energy serves more than 3.7 million electric customers across parts of eight states—Colorado, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, North Dakota, South Dakota, Texas, and New Mexico. Through a partnership with Xcel Energy, NLR developed scenarios to analyze selected areas within the utility’s electric distribution network and provided high-resolution information on how it may be affected by different scenarios of electric demand in both quantity and time of day.

These scenarios led to the development of a new open-source tool, the Electric Vehicle Infrastructure – Distribution System Integration Tool (EVI-DiST). EVI-DiST enables any utility to analyze their distribution networks and assess the effectiveness of energy management strategies that mitigate ratepayer impacts. While the model was developed for vehicle charging, it is broadly applicable to distributed energy resources that may be installed by home or property owners.

“Working with Xcel Energy provided us the opportunity to identify and understand the critical power demand challenges from the utility perspective, ensuring our solutions accounted for their individual, complex energy needs,” said NLR’s John Kisacikoglu, a senior researcher and the project lead. “We worked to understand how utilities can most cost-effectively navigate the distributed, mobile, and flexible nature of charging vehicles.”

Smart Energy Management Can Optimize Grid Performance, Minimize Cost

Traditionally, utilities upgrade, supplement, or even replace electrical distribution infrastructure to address increasing loads and preserve reliable and safe operations. These upgrades can be time consuming and expensive, which can affect both the quality of service and cost to ratepayers. Utilities have long pursued alternatives to infrastructure upgrades. Now, both growth of new sources of energy demand coupled with sophisticated processing and communication capabilities enables a new set of options that are less time intensive and more affordable. These solutions are “smart” in more than one sense of the word.

Smart energy management (SEM) has the potential to help utilities meet the energy needs of large loads—like data centers and vehicle charging—with fewer distribution system upgrades by moving peak energy demand to occur during the time of day when there is less overall grid demand.

Similar to roads and highways that have periods of increased traffic and congestion, the electric grid has patterns of use that vary significantly over the course of the day and seasonally. In the analysis for Xcel Energy, NLR found that for one of the feeders (part of grid distribution infrastructure) they studied, grid-aware active SEM combined with the long periods of time residential vehicles are usually available to charge (like overnight), enabled more than 94% of charging sessions to be fully satisfied without increasing the number of transformer overloads, compared to a condition without SEM.

SEM options range from time-of-use charges that reduce peak load by providing options for consumers to save money by using electricity during nonpeak times, to more grid-responsive solutions that modulate power based on real-time signals from the power grid (called “grid-aware”). When these options are executed correctly, a utility can spread the electric load over time so that the demand on the equipment distributing the energy is always at or below safe and reliable levels. SEM can allow utilities to continue to serve customers while reducing the need for electric grid upgrades.

For a utility, deciding what kind of SEM control to implement requires having a high-resolution view of their existing grid system, estimating the current and potential growth of demand, and modeling the impacts of different SEM strategies, all to ensure the decisions they make are future-proof and based in accurate data. If that sounds complicated, that’s because it is.

“If you want to understand electricity demand in a parking lot or warehouse, that system is not as complicated,” Kisacikoglu said. “But modeling electricity demand on various electric feeders that span across miles of cities, going into different residential and commercial regions, is not easy. This is especially true when these sources of demand have the ability to move around.”

Researchers Collaborate To Create Custom Models for Xcel Energy in Colorado

Solving challenges that transcend electricity, building, and transportation sectors requires a certain depth and breadth of knowledge that National Laboratory of the Rockies researchers are especially equipped for, given that the organization specializes in holistic energy systems integration. For this particular project, NLR researchers from across transportation, grid planning, and analysis supported Xcel Energy over the course of two years to conduct the analysis and modeling the utility would need to understand their options.

“It added so much value to connect these already well-developed areas of expertise within NLR to access the level of technical expertise we needed to solve this utility-scale challenge,” Kisacikoglu said.

NLR transportation researchers combined existing data and models to develop vehicle energy demand scenarios in Colorado’s Boulder and Aurora service areas near metro Denver. Meanwhile, the grid planning team used data provided by Xcel Energy on their distribution network infrastructure, like distribution lines, feeders, and transformers, to map Xcel Energy’s grid down to the neighborhood level. The team extrapolated that data to extend their model further to secondary and low-voltage lines that serve customers directly—which is necessary to understand needs and impacts on customers.

“We were able to model how the power flows all the way from substation transformers, through electrical lines, to distribution transformers, and into our houses,” said Shibani Ghosh, an NLR grid planning and analysis researcher who worked on the Xcel Energy project. “That information was crucial for developing the baseline model on which the rest of the analysis was based.”

The researchers then combined the vehicle energy demand scenarios with the detailed property-level grid map to create a synthetic forecast, both now and in future scenarios. With this information, they were ready to jump into detailed analyses of how the local grid network in the two sample service areas would be impacted by different energy demand loads and how different SEM approaches might help mitigate extreme stress to the power grid.

The NLR team applied several different SEM controls to projected loads at both the feeder and transformer levels in the selected service areas. Studying different kinds of SEM revealed what factors could go into a utility’s decision-making. Analyzing impacts at both the upstream and individual transformer levels allowed the research team to gain both broad and deep insights into the choices the utility could make to address demand.

“Feeder-level insights can allow the utility to make sense of how population density and distribution of new sources of electricity demand impact the feeders and distribution lines,” Ghosh said. “But only viewing impacts at that level may wash out some of the smaller-scale effects at the transformer level, for example, of smaller pockets of electricity use that could only be resolved with an infrastructure upgrade. Our higher-granularity analysis is highly valuable to help utilities like Xcel Energy balance infrastructure upgrades with SEM algorithm-based solutions.”

Expanding the Project’s Reach With EVI-DiST

While the NLR team was originally tasked only to conduct the analysis and provide Xcel Energy with insights into different SEM options and their impacts, researchers realized there was more to be done.

“We enhanced their analysis process by combining our transportation and grid modeling capabilities to help Xcel Energy get in front of an issue that they clearly saw coming and wanted to proactively address, but we also wanted to develop a way to capture these processes to address other utilities’ priorities,” Kisacikoglu said. “We decided to take the opportunity to meet that need by developing EVI-DiST, which is a step toward automating and generalizing our capabilities for any utility in the nation to use.”

With around 3,000 utility companies nationwide, that is a tall order. The NLR team needed to make the tool as easy to use as possible.

The way Xcel Energy sorted and named their distribution system data was different from NLR’s approach to labeling modeling data. That meant, in order to accurately model demand on Xcel Energy’s grid, the research team had to meticulously match NLR’s data into Xcel Energy’s labeling system to ensure consistency. Then, to embed this data conversion process into EVI-DiST, they also needed to develop documentation.

“Though the tool was initially tailored to Xcel Energy’s needs, we created clear guidance on how the data should be formatted for future users,” said NLR’s Emin Ucer, a grid integration control and software engineer and lead researcher on the development of EVI-DiST. “We explicitly detailed how anyone can convert their data into the right format to use the tool.”

EVI-DiST also offers two different modes that a utility can use to address their specific concerns and identify in detail where and what solutions may be applicable. The “Lite” mode is quicker to run and allows utilities to gain insight into impacts at the higher feeder level, or transformer level, across the span of one week. This mode does not require any electrical feeder model, so there is no power flow simulation, meaning it has a lower computational load and in return provides a bird’s-eye view of operational impacts of loads and compares SEM options at scale.

“Plus” mode, on the other hand, does run an in-depth power flow simulation and provides detailed data on electric loads and voltages on transformers and secondary distribution lines. This can only provide insights on the time scale of one day and for just one SEM option, but it can help a utility dive deeper into specific parts of their distribution network that may be under higher or lower stress from voltage levels and loading conditions. Using these two modes of EVI-DiST, a utility could, for example, discover both which SEM algorithm might be the best fit for a specific service area as well as where they might need to upgrade some infrastructure to best serve users.

Releasing EVI-DiST in an open-source format puts the tool directly in the hands of its users. Rather than providing access only through a licensing agreement, the NLR team decided to put the code for the tool up on GitHub. They say it will make it easier for users to provide critical feedback that can help improve the tool.

“By making EVI-DiST open-source, we can directly collaborate with utility companies to identify ways to solve the problem and improve the tool’s functionalities, ultimately augmenting the value of our efforts,” Kisacikoglu said. “This option also offers us a meaningful way to deliver NLR’s expertise straight to end users.”

To learn more about NLR’s custom analyses using EVI-DiST or to explore related partnership opportunities with NLR, contact [email protected].

Follow NLR’s transportation and mobility research and sign up for NLR’s Mobility Matters newsletter to stay current on the latest news. Learn more about NLR’s grid modernization research.

Source: US National Renewable Energy Laboratory

Postdoc Gives Winning Presentation About Recovering Critical Metals From Spent Batteries

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On April 15, 2026, Kalen Rasmussen, a postdoctoral researcher at the National Laboratory of the Rockies (NLR), competed with 16 other early-career researchers at the National Lab Research SLAM.

Participants had just three minutes and one slide to present their research to an audience of more than 200 policymakers, congressional staffers, and laboratory representatives in the Congressional Auditorium on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. More than 2,150 additional viewers tuned in to watch the livestream of the event, with laboratories hosting watch parties across the country.

A panel of esteemed judges evaluated the scientists on their comprehension, content, engagement, and communication. Finalists vied for awards in five categories: Energy Security, National Security, Scientific Discovery, Advanced Materials, and People’s Choice.

Rasmussen won the Energy Security award for his talk, “From Microbes to Metals: Powering Energy Security.” His work at NLR leverages spent batteries—a steady waste stream—to bolster the domestic critical metal supply chain and ensure U.S. energy security and independence.

He began his presentation by describing how the batteries that power the modern world depend on critical metals. When these batteries reach the end of their life, they often end up in a landfill—removing them from the supply and forcing the United States to continue buying more, often from geopolitical rivals.

“We go through roughly 250,000 tons of batteries every year,” Rasmussen said. “For context, it would take 7,000 fully loaded semitrucks to haul away just one year’s worth of spent batteries [in the United States].”

Current battery recycling, he explained, is inefficient or involves harsh chemicals and generates toxic waste. Instead, Rasmussen and his team look toward a tiny microbial hero: Acidithiobacillus ferrooxidans.

Through a process called bioleaching, these microbes create an environment that dissolves battery metals, allowing them to be purified and remanufactured. Within that process, however, the dissolved metals are toxic, even to A. ferrooxidans.

Rasmussen’s research aims to increase A. ferrooxidans’ resistance to these toxic metals, turning the microbe from a hero into a superhero when it comes to battery recycling. The result can help recover metals that already exist in the United States.

“While batteries power the modern world, microbes allow us to power the U.S. independently,” he said.

Rasmussen said the biggest takeaway from the SLAM was the power of distilling complex science into something anyone can enjoy and learn from.

“You can have macro-sized science, and you can present it in a micro-sized three-minute talk, and you can do it very clearly to a very broad audience and even to people who may not be subject experts or even scientists,” he said. “And hopefully, especially being in a place like here in D.C., we can convey a message that really inspires them.”

For Rasmussen, winning was about more than himself.

“Winning means—not to be a little cliché—but I think it means a tremendous amount, not just to me but also to the people that helped get me here,” he said. “It’s really the culmination of a village to be here. The entire process wouldn’t have been possible without them, and it makes it a little bit more sweet that some of them were here to join me.”

Sponsored by the House Science and National Labs Caucus and the Senate National Laboratory Caucus, the National Lab Research SLAM aims to highlight the key role and impact of U.S. Department of Energy laboratories in the nation’s innovation ecosystem.

Learn more about NLR’s bioenergy and bioeconomy research and explore NLR’s critical minerals research. Read about the event and finalists at the National Lab Research SLAM site.

Source: US National Renewable Energy Laboratory

Data Center Demonstrations, Electronics Innovation, AI Operations, and More

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In the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, spanning two laboratory campuses, hundreds of acres, and thousands of hardware devices, researchers bring all imaginable energy systems to life.

Right there, among trailers of electrical equipment and fiber-optic cables, they simulate a busy shipyard with round-the-clock power demands or a military microgrid with critical resilience requirements.

The goal? To help partners respond to doubts, address difficulties, or make decisions about their future energy systems.

This versatile capability is the Advanced Research on Integrated Energy Systems (ARIES) platform at the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Laboratory of the Rockies (NLR). Now in its fifth year of operation, ARIES has helped partners manage risks and reach new milestones with its distinct brand of real-system replication.

“Thanks to its unmatched ability to simulate real-world conditions, ARIES has guided the way forward for every new energy trend, breakthrough technology, or emerging challenge,” said ARIES External Advisory Board Chair Adrienne Lotto. “Over the last five years, ARIES has empowered utilities to restore grid reliability when there were no other solutions and shown rural communities how smart microgrids can save money and spark growth.”

Below is a roundup of 2025 ARIES accomplishments.

Grid Reliability From Data Centers and Inverters

Utilities and companies are building technologically advanced, multisource power systems. They are pursuing grid investments that include large loads and dynamic energy supplies. As such, they seek proof that their investments will be profitable and that the grid will remain reliable. This pursuit brought them to ARIES.

In one 2025 partnership, data center company Verrus used ARIES to evaluate its grid-aware controls. On a virtual 70-megawatt utility-scale system, Verrus modeled its solution that leverages data centers for grid flexibility. The demonstration is a landmark in the design and planning of data centers, which otherwise require large-scale, long-term utility expansion.

Also in 2025, ARIES added a new capability to test the tangible effects of data centers on the grid: Researchers set up a 2.5-megawatt spinning generator connected to an emulated data center. With data from a major data center provider, the researchers showed for the first time materially how generator parts wear down from the flickering demands of data centers.

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This type of physical-virtual testing is the cornerstone of ARIES and is central to grid reliability research and the validation of inverter-based power systems. Major utility partners like Xcel Energy, Florida Power & Light, and Southern Company each turned to ARIES to confirm advanced inverter functions on their systems, such as aggregating inverter-based resources to provide grid services.

Expanding Supply Without Risk

With 200-plus physical assets, 27 megavolt-amperes of experimental power, and a 44-petaflop high-performance computer, ARIES evaluates new deployments on various energy systems. The sandbox-like ARIES simulations allow researchers to play out various energy system scenarios to build out new generation around the country.

In Sitka, Alaska, hydropower sustains a thriving, remote community whose industries blend tourism and fishing. Researchers emulated the Sitka microgrid with ARIES, helping the city-owned electric cooperative model some of the long-term difficulties of managing and maintaining its resilient power supply.

Similar work occurred on the Hawaiian island of Kauai but with a more urgent focus on ensuring grid stability. The island’s energy cooperative recognized oscillations on its grid and needed to find the source and solution before adding more inverter-based generation. Alongside NLR and other partners, the co-op  built a miniature Kauai grid using ARIES, which could diagnose the oscillations with real runtime data from Kauai’s grid. They successfully discovered their stability solution using certain inverter controls, and ARIES was indispensable along the way.

Always Innovating, Ahead of Adversaries, Prepared for Partners

The contours of ARIES are always reshaping to serve the research needs of tomorrow’s energy system. In 2025, a few core, in-demand capabilities took shape.

On the security front, ARIES added a threat-to-consequence platform to emulate worst-case scenarios across all legacy and emerging energy technologies. This experimental platform has modeled hypothetical region-spanning security events of compounding consequences.

NLR also completed a new ARIES control center facility. For all the utility and grid operations work that ARIES supports, the control center is the hub. It is a familiar environment for operators, with immersive workstations for situational awareness. What sets it apart is its ARIES connections: high-speed fiber-optic connections to other laboratories via ESnet, real-time simulation capacity, and visualization of the cyber-physical proceedings in projects. Highly distinct are its AI-assisted operations, developed by researchers at NLR who are preparing utilities to incorporate AI for streamlined decisions and response.

Few Limits for the Future, Every Reason for ARIES

One of the greatest challenges across U.S. energy systems is risk management. Amid rapid buildout, a dynamic cyber domain, and constant innovation, the energy sector seeks reassurance.

In the 2025 ARIES Annual Report, NLR Director Jud Virden wrote: “Independent testing and validation of new energy technologies and their impact on energy systems will be key to providing increased energy generation while ensuring system reliability and security. We believe that NLR and the ARIES platform capabilities will be critical and central to resolving energy system and operational challenges. NLR’s combination of physical testing with high-fidelity emulation at scale provides the data and objective analysis needed by national, regional, and local stakeholders to make informed decisions—faster.”

The road ahead for the energy sector—clearly oriented toward more load, more supply, lower costs, and fewer outages—has plenty of risks to manage. Partners are drawn to ARIES to reduce those risks so they can move forward with validated, reliable energy systems.

ARIES, along with its connections throughout the Department of Energy laboratory complex, is at the service of U.S. industry and innovation. To see how ARIES can advance your energy system work, contact [email protected].

Source: US National Renewable Energy Laboratory

Optoelectronic Synapse Shows Exceptional Photoresponse for Neuromorphic Vision

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Like so much else in nature, the human visual system has both a complex structure and functional efficiency that is difficult for scientists to replicate. The system is both a sensor and a processor, with the eyes and the brain working together to resolve images with less energy use than anything people have invented.

But a technology called optoelectronic synapses can reproduce at least some of the phenomena that make human vision so successful, and a team of researchers at the National Laboratory of the Rockies (NLR) has discovered why certain materials perform so well at artificial vision and memory.

In their article “Interlayer Exciton Polarons in Mesoscopic V₂O₅ for Broadband Optoelectronic Synapses” published in Advanced Functional Materials, the NLR-led research team discovered the source of persistent photoconductivity—a mechanism that mirrors some of the functionality of biological synapses in the eye—for a particular vanadium-oxide material.

This work was part of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Reconfigurable Electronic Materials Inspired by Nonlinear Neuron Dynamics (reMIND) Energy Frontier Research Center, funded by the Office of Science Basic Energy Sciences program, and was coauthored with researchers from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Texas A&M University, and Istituto di Struttura della Materia-CNR.

“This work builds on years of past research in optoelectronics, but it also presents a fundamental discovery of how certain atomic vacancies give rise to longer photoresponse times, which is a key to eye-like vision and applications like multispectral imaging, sensing, and communications,” said Lance Wheeler, NLR scientist and contributing author.

From Crystal to Synapse

For decades, scientists have known of persistent photoconductivity in certain oxide crystals, which have especially long-lasting conduction after exposure to light. The exact cause of these phenomena has been debated among specialists but was presumed to result from missing oxygen atoms.

In this work, the scientists elucidated the exact role of oxygen vacancies by modeling, fabricating, and testing optoelectronic synapse devices based on α-phase vanadium pentoxide (V₂O₅).

They found oxygen vacancies within the V₂O₅ crystals trapped charges created from incoming light, forming a so-called “polaron,” which endows the crystal with a sort of memory. As long as the charge persists, the crystal keeps a record of the light, which can then be read out with electrodes. During fabrication of the crystals, researchers can modulate characteristics of this optical memory to adjust sensitivity and photoresponse time.

When the team pulsed the material with a variety of light wavelengths, they observed persistence for more than 25 minutes. This longer decay time is functionally similar to a neural synapse. In the brain, this charge persistence leads to long-term potentiation and plasticity—the keys to memory.

Applications in Optoelectronics

This study opens the door to fabricating a new generation of materials with tunable memory and machine vision. Because of the way such crystals emulate synapses, they offer a simplified circuitry that reduces both energy consumption and signal interference.

They also do things our eyes cannot, like see infrared light.

With their sensitivity to a wide spectrum of light—and their ability to be affixed to flexible glass—crystals such as V₂O₅ could be the base for applications in neuromorphic vision, such as robotics, edge electronics, distributed sensing, bioengineering, and more.

“An important outcome of the study was identifying the role of polarons for achieving tunable persistent photoconductivity in this class of oxide materials,” said Jeffrey Blackburn, NLR research fellow and contributing author.

“This insight—when coupled with areas like low-cost polycrystalline materials, scalable device fabrication methods, broadband sensitivity, and flexible substrates—opens possibilities to exploiting similar mechanisms across a broad array of materials and optically driven neuromorphic device architectures.”

Learn more about basic energy sciences at NLR and about the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science Basic Energy Sciences program. Read “Interlayer Exciton Polarons in Mesoscopic V₂O₅ for Broadband Optoelectronic Synapses” in Advanced Functional Materials.

Source: US National Renewable Energy Laboratory

New Capability Helps Data Centers Lower the Cost of Achieving a Reliable Grid

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The U.S. Department of Energy’s National Laboratory of the Rockies (NLR) today unveiled the Agora large-load test bed, a first-of-its-kind national capability designed to help data centers become active participants in grid reliability.

Agora is funded by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Electricity and industry partners and was designed in close collaboration with industry and utilities to address real-world challenges. It is the only dedicated large-load grid integration test bed across the U.S. national laboratory complex and replicates the technical complexity of a large-scale data center interconnection.

“We built a 20^th-century grid—but today we serve a 21^st‑century, data‑driven, AI‑enabled economy,” said Katie Jereza, Assistant Secretary of DOE’s Office of Electricity. “Through innovative test beds, we are not just experimenting, we are creating confidence in a powerful new capability—one that delivers affordable, reliable, and secure power that our homes, businesses, and overall economy need.”

Historically, most data centers have operated primarily as large electricity consumers, with limited opportunities or incentives to actively support the grid. Utilities also have limited insight into whether these facilities can temporarily reduce or shift operations to help maintain reliability. By adopting flexible designs and cost-saving operational practices, large loads like data centers can lower electricity rates for everyone. For example, when demand is at risk of exceeding supply, a data center could reduce its electricity use to prevent rolling blackouts.

Named “Agora” after the ancient Greek public gathering place for discussion and exchange, the test bed convenes utilities, data center developers, technology providers, and researchers across the country. Major industry partners, including Schneider Electric, Compass Datacenters, and Verrus, are already using Agora to achieve positive impacts for the grid.

“As data centers become one of the fastest-growing sources of electricity demand in the United States, utilities are being asked to manage large loads at a scale and speed the grid was not originally designed for,” said Jaquelin Cochran, Associate Laboratory Director of Strategic Energy Analysis and Decision Sciences at NLR. “The Agora test bed was built to answer one of the most important questions facing the power sector today: How do we advance U.S. leadership in AI and data centers while protecting ratepayers?”

By bringing together stakeholders in a “plug-and-play” environment, Agora is advancing informed and coordinated approaches to large-load grid integration.

“Very few facilities in the country can study both the grid and interactions with large loads under real-world conditions and at this level of detail,” said Martha Symko-Davies, Laboratory Program Manager for the Office of Electricity at NLR. “That integrated detail is essential as energy demand is growing exponentially and data centers need to establish themselves as good grid citizens—energy users that share responsibility for keeping the grid reliable.”

NLR will continue to partner with more utilities and data centers to adapt Agora’s capabilities and meet evolving industry needs.

The Agora test bed joins a suite of Office of Electricity-funded grid management and control assets at NLR and is part of the Advanced Research on Integrated Energy Systems (ARIES) platform—a visionary research platform sponsored by DOE’s Office of Critical Minerals and Energy Innovation that advances affordable, reliable, and secure energy systems.

The National Laboratory of the Rockies is a national laboratory of the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Critical Minerals and Energy Innovation, operated under Contract No. DE-AC36-08GO28308.

Source: US National Renewable Energy Laboratory

Kestrel Supercomputer Advanced More Than 500 Energy Modeling and Simulation Projects

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The National Laboratory of the Rockies’ (NLR’s) advanced computing capabilities continue to grow with the demands and complexities of applied energy research, with key upgrades to the laboratory’s Kestrel supercomputer supporting hundreds of projects with dozens of collaborators in 2025.

NLR’s Fiscal Year 2025 Advanced Computing Annual Report shows how the laboratory’s high-performance computing, artificial intelligence (AI), and modeling capabilities contribute to U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) programs and can boost scientific discovery across the laboratory’s research portfolio.

NLR’s high-performance computing system—Kestrel—and other resources, including hybrid cloud computing, helped advance more than 500 modeling and simulation projects and supported 800-plus users who produced more than 700 technical outputs, including 293 peer-reviewed publications in Fiscal Year 2025. These outputs progressed work in materials science, integrated energy systems, manufacturing, fluid dynamics, and more.

“This year’s report highlights the growing importance and benefit of AI throughout applied energy research and features work by early-career researchers who are helping shape the future of computing-enabled energy innovation,” said Kris Munch, NLR’s program manager for Advanced Computing.

NLR’s Kestrel supercomputer received a set of capability upgrades for Fiscal Year 2025, expanding performance and capacity to better meet the demands of AI-enabled research. These enhancements included upgrades to two central processing unit racks and expansion of Kestrel’s graphics processing unit resources, boosting throughput for emerging AI and machine-learning workflows, such as large model training and surrogate modeling. Memory capacity was also expanded on a targeted subset of central processing unit and graphics processing unit nodes, enabling researchers to tackle larger models, higher-resolution datasets, and more complex systems.

Efforts featured in the annual report include projects that discover new materials, optimize industrial reactors, and improve energy system planning:

• NLR’s ElectroCat modeling team uses machine learning powered by Kestrel to explore cost-effective and scalable alternatives for scarce and costly metals used in battery and energy storage technologies. This effort can speed up screening of critical-mineral-free electrocatalysts and help to identify efficient, durable, and inexpensive options.
• The BioReactorDesign open-source modeling tool allows new bioreactor designs to be tested and optimized virtually before they are built. Using accurate, computationally efficient predictions of gas-liquid flow behavior, this modeling effort aims to reduce the risks and costs of traditional bioreactor scaleup.
• NLR’s demand-side grid (dsgrid) team uses sector-specific energy modeling expertise to understand current and future U.S. electricity load for power systems planning. Researchers are further developing the dsgrid toolkit by linking to other DOE models to project high-resolution electricity load scenarios, seeking to strengthen region-specific planning and improve whole-economy analysis.

Explore the Fiscal Year 2025 Advanced Computing Annual Report highlights or download the full report to learn more about how NLR’s advanced computing capabilities enable researchers to tackle complex energy challenges and facilitate scientific discovery for real-world applications.

Source: US National Renewable Energy Laboratory

To Shoot for the Moon, Lab Researchers Must First Learn How To Fail on Earth

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Weeks ago, four NASA astronauts completed a pioneering journey around the moon. For 10 days, lithium-ion batteries on Artemis II played an important role in powering various communications, navigation, propulsion, and thermal systems.

Making sure these batteries were up for the mission is a challenge the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Laboratory of the Rockies (NLR) has spent more than a decade collaborating with NASA to address.

As it turns out, part of the solution for safer batteries was learning how to make them fail … on purpose. NASA recently awarded NLR researchers and industry partner KULR Technology Group the 2025 Invention of the Year for an innovation that enables scientists to implant an internal short-circuit device (ISC-D) into lithium-ion cells, triggering battery failure that improves battery testing for space-bound systems.

“The ISC-D trigger cells are our preferred method of conducting our battery test campaigns for all our manned missions,” said Eric Darcy, former battery technical discipline lead at NASA’s Johnson Space Center.

Understanding Failure To Design Safer Batteries

The key to building safer batteries—for space or otherwise—lies in understanding how they fail. Researchers have several methods to analyze battery failure, such as using abuse tests to measure thermal output caused by chemical reactions or examining the composition of battery materials with high-speed X-ray diagnostics. Historically, these abuse tests were limited to external triggers, including nail penetration, overheating, and crushing.

While evaluating how external abuse leads to cell breakdown is an important part of battery safety research, these approaches are unable to replicate the unique reactions that occur when microscopic manufacturing defects cause an internal short circuit. The heat generated within a single cell can spread quickly to neighboring cells and the larger battery pack through a chain reaction of venting gas and extreme heat called thermal runaway. This system-wide failure can have disastrous results, particularly in the harsh and isolated conditions of outer space.

In the worst-case scenario, a flaw introduced by a speck of dust could bring down an entire space capsule and its crew. The ICS-D allows researchers to examine how cells react to internal triggers and design specific thermal management strategies to mitigate battery system failures caused by such defects.

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The ISC-D itself consists of three layered metal discs insulated by a thin layer of wax that can be implanted between the anode and cathode of a cell. When researchers are ready to trigger a failure, they increase the cell’s temperature to 57˚C—slightly cooler than a fresh cup of coffee—melting the wax and allowing the metal components to touch, triggering a short circuit in a controlled environment.

“The ISC-D is similar to placing a wrench between the layers of a cell in a precise, repeatable, and controlled environment,” said Matthew Keyser, NLR senior energy storage engineer. “The triggered ISC-D acts as a conductor between the anode and cathode, quickly discharging all the energy within the battery as intense, concentrated heat. The energy release typically exits the cell through a vent that can become a blow torch to adjacent cells.”

Due to disastrous repercussions of battery failures in space, NASA has some of the most rigorous battery safety standards in the world. The laboratory’s ISC-D helps ensure battery systems can handle extreme operating environments. Scientists can run ISC-D tests repeatedly until their battery system designs can withstand and defuse isolated incidents caused by unseen manufacturing defects, even in the most demanding applications, such as a round trip to the moon.

“Nearly all battery designs for manned spacecraft applications have been verified to resist propagation of thermal runaway from cell to cell thanks to test campaigns using trigger cells with the ISC-D,” Darcy said. “Properly designed batteries can tolerate a single-cell thermal runaway event in any location without propagation, which only degrades performance. In contrast, if thermal runaway propagates from cell to cell, it can lead to catastrophic failure.”

The ISC-D Origin Story

This collaboration between NASA and NLR dates back to 2010, when Darcy took a one-year sabbatical to work on NLR’s electrochemical energy storage team alongside Keyser and Emeritus Energy Storage Engineer Ahmad Pesaran.

The team used NLR’s existing ISC-D designs to solve a problem that long frustrated the battery industry: creating a reliable way to replicate an internal short circuit in the lab. By the end of the year, the team had created an ISC-D proof of concept worth pursuing.

The success of the ISC-D hinged on the wax insulation. Darcy suggested paraffin wax, but it turned out to be too brittle, flaking apart when the device was rolled into a battery cell. Next, Keyser suggested microcrystalline wax, which was too soft. The ISC-D needed the best of both worlds: flexible enough to bend but rigid enough not to accidentally trigger.

After countless tests—including extensive characterization, differential scanning, and calorimetry—the research team landed on the right paraffin-microcrystalline blend to prompt a controlled failure without damaging the cell beforehand.

“It sounds straightforward, but it took us years to produce a consistent short circuit, even with the specialized equipment and infrastructure available at NLR,” Keyser said. “We are grateful for the support from NASA and the U.S. Department of Energy that helped make this happen.”

The resulting invention went on to earn a prestigious R&D 100 Award, and NLR exclusively licensed the technology to KULR Technology Group, a battery safety and thermal management company.

“It is a very elegant solution,” KULR Chief Technology Officer and past NASA battery engineer Will Walker said. “For KULR, we want to be at the forefront of cutting-edge technology as it pertains to safety, and this is the only true noninvasive triggering method available.”

From NLR to the Moon

Today, KULR has taken the technology a step further: Rather than offering the ISC-D as a standalone product, KULR is now delivering battery cells with the ISC-D already implanted inside. This approach enables safety testing at the product level as preassembled battery systems, not just the single cell.

However, these preloaded ISC-D batteries introduced new safety challenges. KULR consulted directly with the ISC-D inventors at NLR to ensure the batteries could be transported and stored without incident.

“It’s important to be very rigid about safety and quality control,” Keyser said. “We developed strict protocols to discharge cells down to zero percent before shipping, no exceptions, to eliminate the chance of thermal runaway.”

When NASA named the ISC-D its 2025 Invention of the Year, it was the combination of NLR’s foundational research and KULR’s innovative application that earned the recognition. While the original invention gave scientists a new way to understand battery failure, KULR’s embedded-cell approach streamlines testing processes for industry.

As batteries grow more powerful and more ubiquitous—in the cars we drive, the planes we board, the phones in our pockets, and the spacecraft circling the moon—the ability to understand exactly how they fail has never been more critical to ensure safety. According to KULR and NASA, the ISC-D is now used by more than 80 companies, including SpaceX, Tesla, Toyota, and Volkswagen, to test the batteries powering commercial aircraft, satellites, and vehicles.

“Winning this award is a significant accomplishment,” Keyser said. “This project highlights the impact of cross-industry partnerships that change the way we evaluate thermal management systems for batteries.”

Source: US National Renewable Energy Laboratory

Free Software Will Help Industry Understand the Full Value of Energy Projects

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Energy productivity—the measure of how much economic value is generated for every unit of energy used—can be underestimated when multiple benefits are overlooked.

Multiple benefits are the operational and strategic improvements—such as productivity gains, quality enhancements, safety improvements, reduced downtime, and lower maintenance costs—that occur alongside energy cost savings in an energy productivity project. Overlooking these types of multiple benefits can leave money on the table and businesses with an incomplete view of all potential cost-saving project outcomes.

To address this gap, the National Laboratory of the Rockies (NLR) and Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) recently released JUSTIFI, a free, open-source software tool that helps manufacturers better understand the full value of their energy improvement projects. The name JUSTIFI reflects its purpose: It is a justification tool that helps users identify, quantify, and report the often-overlooked multiple benefits of energy projects demonstrating how increased energy productivity can directly enhance industrial competitiveness.

When these results are quantified alongside energy savings, they can strengthen the business case for projects by reducing payback periods and demonstrating alignment with an organization’s key performance indicators and strategic objectives.

Ultimately, JUSTIFI can help support more informed decision-making and higher project implementation rates.

“This new tool will help U.S. manufacturers become more competitive,” NLR researcher Sarah Cooney said. “JUSTIFI helps users quantify the connections between an improvement project, operational performance, and business value.”

JUSTIFI also enables users to identify the tangible benefits in their specific project, quantify their value, and connect those results to a business’s strategic goals.

Since its beta release in April 2025, more than 1,000 users have tried JUSTIFI, and NLR and ORNL researchers continue to gather feedback to further enhance its features: The tool can now generate clear, decision-ready or custom-designed reports that tie project outcomes to key performance indicators and highlight payback improvements.

JUSTIFI software contains a database of common multiple benefits. “It is nice that there’s a database that you can search within the software,” said a Michigan State Industrial Training and Assessment Center student who used the software. The tool gives users what they need to build a complete business case for their energy productivity projects: quantifiable outcomes that could yield better return-on-investment metrics than evaluating projects on energy savings alone.

Where is the hidden value in your energy productivity project? Visit the JUSTIFI platform and find out. Users do not need formal training to get started. You can also visit the multiple benefits knowledge library for more resources.

Source: US National Renewable Energy Laboratory

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The National Laboratory of the Rockies (NLR) is launching a new funding opportunity through the Community Microgrid Assistance Partnership (C‑MAP), with funding from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Electricity (OE).

This latest solicitation offers up to $2.5 million in direct project funding supported by $1 million in technical assistance to help energy providers, local governments, and community organizations develop or enhance microgrids serving remote or isolated regions across the United States.

Microgrids play a critical role in delivering affordable, reliable, resilient, and secure electricity in remote areas with high energy costs and poor grid reliability. By generating, storing, and managing electricity within a defined boundary, microgrids can operate independently or alongside the larger grid—supplying energy needs locally.

This second C‑MAP funding round places a strong emphasis on measurable microgrid solutions that support industrial development, including projects serving large energy users such as critical mineral operations and enterprise‑scale computing centers. Strengthening microgrid infrastructure in these regions can help industrial, commercial, public safety, and national security facilities access the dependable energy systems they need to operate and grow. In addition, all projects should support the development of common configurations and development approaches that additional communities and industries can replicate within their own contexts.

“C‑MAP is delivering critical support to parts of the country facing some of the highest electricity costs and lowest reliability. Through NLR’s customized, innovative technical assistance—developed in close coordination with partners across the country—we’re helping communities and high‑demand industries implement microgrid solutions that keep essential services running and maintain operations year‑round,” said NLR Laboratory Program Manager for Grid Integration Murali Baggu.

Funding and Support

Selected projects will receive $200,000–$575,000 in direct funding, along with up to 24 months of technical and administrative support from DOE national laboratories and partners. Awardees will develop replicable microgrid models and advance OE‑supported research toward commercialization.

Topic Areas

The solicitation covers five areas of microgrid development and deployment:

1. Regional Microgrid Coordination: Supporting regional collaboration to improve reliability, security, and affordability for community-based microgrids
2. Microgrid Integration with Large Load Energy Consumers: Providing resources to allow local utilities to work more closely with consumers with high energy needs
3. Microgrid Development: Assisting detailed design efforts for major upgrades of new or existing microgrid energy systems
4. Microgrid Transformation: Providing direct support for the implementation of innovative microgrid improvements
5. Microgrid Assessment for Industrial or Other Large Load Energy Consumers: Assisting large energy consumers considering implementation of an advanced microgrid energy system.

Eligibility

Eligible prime applicants include nonprofit entities supporting community-based microgrid energy systems, such as:

• Energy cooperatives
• State and local governments
• Federally recognized American Indian and Alaska Native Tribes and villages, including Alaska Native villages and regional corporations established under the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act
• (Topic Area 5 only) U.S. businesses with required SAM registration and DUNS number.

Proposed microgrids applications must be in areas of the United States with no more than 10,000 people where electricity prices are high.

Proposals are due June 26, 2026.

Learn More

Register for the informational webinar about the funding solicitation on May 26, 2026.

For full details on the solicitation, eligibility, and application process, visit www.energy.gov/c-map or contact the program team at [email protected].

About C‑MAP

The Community Microgrid Assistance Partnership brings together organizations and energy‑sector stakeholders committed to advancing next‑generation microgrid technologies. NLR administers C‑MAP with support from other DOE national laboratories, nonprofit organizations, and other partners to strengthen energy systems in under‑resourced and industrially important remote regions.

In addition to this funding opportunity, C‑MAP offers free resources to support communities, organizations, and industries at any stage of microgrid planning or development. Through Microgrid Support Services, applicants and stakeholders can request short‑term, on‑demand technical assistance to help address specific microgrid questions or challenges. C‑MAP also hosts the Community Microgrid Innovation Exchange (C‑MIX), an online library featuring hundreds of publicly available tools, case studies, reports, webinars, and other resources designed to guide users from early concept through deployment.

Learn more about all C-MAP resources.

Source: US National Renewable Energy Laboratory

Semiconductor-Catalyst Combo Captures Energy To Drive Chemical Reactions

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Plants and algae make their fuel from sunlight. Perhaps we could do the same using semiconductors. A team of scientists at the National Laboratory of the Rockies (NLR) made strides in that direction.

They discovered a silicon semiconductor coupled to a molecular catalyst can capture higher-energy sunlight that is unused by both plants and human-made panels. Such energy could be used to drive reactions, like that between carbon dioxide and water to form hydrocarbon fuels and chemicals, or that synthesize fertilizer from nitrogen gas, which makes up 20% of our atmosphere.

This work—which touches the fields of artificial photosynthesis and photocatalysis—was recently published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society in an article titled, “High-Energy Hybridized States Enable Long-Lived Hot Electrons in Cobaloxime-Silicon Nanocrystal System.”

“Our work seeks to push the limits of how much energy we can yield from the sun, and the semiconductor-molecular catalyst hybrid system used in this study reveals one possible pathway,” said Nathan Neale, research scientist at NLR and the paper’s lead author. “We found electronic states in this hybrid system keep photogenerated electrons energetic long enough for use in chemical reactions.”

A motivation of this work is that sunlight has more energy available than we currently use. For example, solar panels might use around 20% of the energy in the incident light. Plants and other photosynthetic organisms might use just 1%. In both cases, sunlight transfers its energy to electrons, with the higher-energy electrons quickly losing much of their absorbed energy in the form of heat, which results in low efficiency.

“High-energy electrons often lose their energy very rapidly in materials by coupling with molecular vibrations and heating up their surroundings,” Neale said. “By blending electronic states between the light-harvesting silicon semiconductor and the molecular catalyst, our material kept the electrons ‘hot’ for at least five nanoseconds, which potentially could be used to drive photocatalysis at superior efficiency.”

Although nanoseconds are brief, they are much longer than the tens of femtoseconds typically observed for electron cooling. In fact, the high-energy electrons in this study stayed “hot” for approximately 25,000 times longer than the typical amount of time it takes hot electrons to cool down in silicon.

Keepin’ It Hot

The researchers achieved these longer electron lifetimes by manipulating the molecular chemistry at the semiconductor surface. The important factor is the linking group, an ethylenepyridine unit. This unit fused the silicon nanocrystal to the catalyst and enabled the formation of a hybrid electronic state that allowed the electrons to persist. This revelation about the role of the ethylenepyridine linker compound is a new way of thinking about these molecular bridges.

“The extreme sensitivity to the linking group chemistry teaches us that it is insufficient to simply provide a spatial proximity between a semiconductor and a surface-bound catalyst to achieve efficient photoinduced processes,” the researchers stated in the conclusion of the study.

Neale’s team confirmed the role of the molecular tether by using several spectroscopy methods to study the semiconductor/catalyst hybrid. Next, they performed quantum mechanical calculations to model the exact photoelectronics. They discovered that the blended electronic states allow the hot electrons to spread out in both the silicon and catalyst.

Fuels, Fertilizers, and Beyond

Direct sun-to-fuel semiconductors are not mainstream energy products. But this work builds on widespread research to demonstrate that such new technology is feasible. By using these findings to keep electrons hot longer, engineers could split water to create hydrogen, or carbon dioxide to create hydrocarbon fuels, and harvest more energy.

This work was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science Basic Energy Sciences program and performed in labs at NLR.

Learn more about NLR’s work in photochemistry and basic energy sciences and how to partner with the laboratory on chemistry and nanoscience research. Read “High-Energy Hybridized States Enable Long-Lived Hot Electrons in Cobaloxime-Silicon Nanocrystal System” in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.