Next Installment of 'Powered By' Series Starts Sept. 10

Next Installment of 'Powered By' Series Starts Sept. 10

Monthly Webinar Series Highlights NREL's Grid Planning and Analysis Tools

The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) is extending its "Powered By" webinar series to feature more grid planning and analysis tools starting on Sept. 10.

The webinars, put on by NREL's Grid Planning and Analysis Center (GPAC), are held on the second Tuesday of every month from noon to 1 p.m. ET, and each features a different grid planning and analysis tool or set of tools. The webinars are not traditional tool demonstrations but discussions about real-world questions the tools can answer.

"The 'Powered By' webinar series is intended to pull back the curtain on what powers our analyses and answer participants' questions about how the tools can be used," GPAC Director Jaquelin Cochran said.

The series is relevant to anyone who works in the clean energy space and is interested in grid-related topics, from state and local governments to the renewable energy and utility industries. It kicked off in March and has included vibrant discussions about ways the tools can benefit attendees and their grid planning and analysis needs.

"We knew there was a lot of interest in understanding NREL's tools, but it was exciting to see people engaging from so many different types of institutions," Cochran said. "The participants' questions have been really helpful in shaping our plans for model development and what questions we should be answering with those models."

Slides and recordings for the first installment of webinars are housed under Webinar Topics on the "Powered By" webpage.

Upcoming Webinars

The next round of webinars will feature an exciting lineup of tools that are helping to address the most pressing power grid challenges and questions. Upcoming webinars include:

• Sept. 10: PRAS
  Hosted by NREL's Gord Stephen, this webinar features Probabilistic Resource Adequacy Suite (PRAS), an open-source, research-oriented collection of tools for analyzing the resource adequacy of bulk power systems.
• Oct. 8: Transmission Planning
  Delve into NREL's integrated transmission planning framework that is helping to solve planning problems at a scale and depth that pushes the boundaries of existing practice transmission system modeling and analysis tools. This webinar is hosted by NREL's Jarrad Wright, a researcher on the National Transmission Planning Study.
• Nov. 12: OCHRE
  This webinar hosted by NREL's Michael Blonsky focuses on Object-Oriented Controllable High-Resolution Residential Energy Model (OHCRE™), an open-source energy modeling tool designed to model flexible loads in residential buildings.
• Dec. 10: HELICS
  Join NREL's Bryan Palmintier to learn about Hierarchical Engine for Large-scale Infrastructure Co-Simulation (HELICS)-an open-source cosimulation platform that enables integrated multisector/multiscale analysis by bringing together existing software simulators so they exchange information during run time to form a comprehensive simulation.
• Jan 14: EMIS
  Hosted by NREL's Bethany Frew, this webinar highlights Energy Management Information Systems (EMIS), an open-source agent-based capacity expansion model designed to capture the interactions between wholesale electricity market design, investment decisions, and resource adequacy.
• Feb. 11: CADET
  This webinar with NREL's Jeremy Keen showcases Capacity Expansion Decision Support for Distribution Networks (CADET), a long-term distribution capacity planning strategy decision support tool.

Ultimately, GPAC wants to host another webinar series on the biggest questions people have about the grid right now and how NREL addresses those questions using different combinations of NREL tools.

"The 'Powered By' webinars create a catalogue of background information on our tools, allowing us in future webinar series to spend more time focused on how to address complex questions using a combination of these tools," Cochran said.

Register for the upcoming "Powered By" webinars.Learn about NREL's grid modernization and energy analysis research.