Decade of Digital Computing Speeds Transformative Shift to Clean Energy

In the ensuing years, a procession of basic and materials science advances has helped pave the way for NREL to tackle increasingly complex energy transition challenges, with HPC driving innovative discovery. For example:

• Microstructure modeling of lithium-ion batteries expounded on the link between lithium-ion battery electrode microstructures and performance, leading to the open-source MATBOX toolbox, which supports microscale and macroscale electrochemical modeling.

• NREL analysis of solar thermochemical hydrogen production, the water-splitting technology that may produce hydrogen more efficiently, identified the potential of perovskite materials to play a role in renewable hydrogen production.

• Short-range order-the organized arrangement of molecules or atoms in disordered solutions-is important in fields like semiconductor physics. Researchers simulated perfect short-range order in a solid solution alloy phase, demonstrating quality electronic properties and signaling superior carrier transport. The findings may support the search for new materials, such as superconductors or thermoelectrics.

Peregrine-supported projects have also played a pivotal role in helping industry and partners clear hurdles to commercializing technology innovations accelerating paths to market.

"Lithium plating"-a phenomenon similar to rust, which causes lithium atoms to become inert and build up on the anode of a battery-has catastrophic impacts on battery performance. In this magnified image of lithium ions moving through the electrolyte into the negative electrode, the bright white depicts high flux as the ions must converge and travel faster through constricting pores. The eXtreme Fast Charge and Cell Evaluation of Lithium-ion batteries program out of the DOE Vehicle Technologies Office Energy Storage Program demonstrated new, more efficient techniques to quantify lithium plating with electrochemical measurements and advanced computer modeling.

Increasingly, NREL's cleantech innovations, reliable datasets, game-changing modeling tools, and groundbreaking energy analysis helped inform the clean energy visions and goals of states, territories, Tribes, and communities. Los Angeles was on the leading edge, as the largest U.S. city to envision a 100% clean energy future.

LA Taps NREL To Explore Pathways to 100% as HPC Demands Mount

In 2017, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) looked to NREL to lead the Los Angeles 100% Renewable Energy Study (LA100). LADWP sought to leverage NREL's decades of experience studying high-renewable power systems at various scales, from the Renewable Electricity Futures Study to ERGIS and NARIS.

"LA100 is a first-of-its-kind objective, rigorous, highly detailed, and science-based study to analyze potential pathways the LA community can take to achieve a 100% clean energy future," said Dr. Jaquelin Cochran, manager of NREL's Grid Systems Analysis Group and principal investigator of the LA100 Study.

The ambitious, multiyear project tapped into diverse capabilities across NREL's research programs, including:

• Detailed electricity demand modeling

• Power system investments and operations analysis

• Economic impact analysis

• Distribution grid modeling

• Life-cycle greenhouse gas emissions analysis.

As the research ramped up, demand for HPC exploded. Soon Peregrine, the world's largest supercomputer dedicated to energy efficiency and renewable energy, was oversubscribed.

Eagle Swoops in, Boosting Speed and Broadening Insights

Eagle landed at ESIF in mid-2018 and went online in 2019, five years after Peregrine. Equipped with the latest Intel Xeon processors and boasting a peak performance of 8.0 petaflops, NREL's next-generation Hewlett Packard Enterprise supercomputer could perform 8 million-billion calculations per second, more than tripling the laboratory's computing capability. The system also included a high-speed parallel centralized file system and data storage components.

With Eagle in the house, NREL researchers were able to run increasingly detailed models that simulated complex processes, systems, and phenomena at higher speeds, gaining crosscutting insights that informed energy transition pathways in LA and beyond.

"A power system transition of this scale benefits from complex analysis to provide deep insights for electrification, clean mobility, and power-sector decarbonization, coupled with implications for environmental justice, air quality, and economics," Cochran said. "To that end, the LA100 study charts a methodology that can be used to replicate, build upon, and scale up this type of analysis for other questions and jurisdictions."

Results from LA100 revealed LADWP could achieve its 100% renewable electricity goal by 2045-or even 2035-while maintaining reliable power for LA customers. By the time LA100 was released in 2021, hundreds of other jurisdictions, institutions, companies, utilities, and state and federal agencies had turned to NREL for data-driven clean energy decision support as they embarked on energy transitions of their own.

A multidisciplinary team of dozens of NREL experts ran more than 100 million simulations at ultrahigh spatial and temporal resolution to evaluate a range of future scenarios that informed the LADWP power system's evolution to a 100% renewable future.

Results from LA100 revealed LADWP could achieve its 100% renewable electricity goal by 2045-or even 2035-while maintaining reliable power for LA customers. By the time LA100 was released in 2021, hundreds of other jurisdictions, institutions, companies, utilities, and state and federal agencies had turned to NREL for data-driven clean energy decision support as they embarked on energy transitions of their own.

Dallas Fort Worth (DFW) International Airport was among them. DFW sought NREL's help exploring the potential of leading-edge transportation technologies to improve the efficiency and affordability of the energy used to move people and goods through one of the busiest airports in the world.

The initiative, dubbed Athena, drew upon NREL's expertise in computational science, vehicle technologies, and mobility systems to develop and run sophisticated models to inform long-term investments at DFW. Athena culled data from individuals, traffic, freight routes, flight schedules, autonomous vehicles, and other sources to develop a "digital twin" model of DFW.

Using data-driven statistical modeling and artificial intelligence (AI), DFW's digital twin simulated future scenarios and mobility options to help DFW and other transportation hubs understand the impacts of transformative technologies and optimize energy use and costs.

As energy transitions gained momentum, the need to solve more problems faster increased. By the end of 2021, almost 300 NREL projects were using Eagle to advance a range of research priorities, including:

• Materials science discoveries involving chemical and material compositions

• Computational fluid dynamics simulations for wind turbines

• Grid dynamics studies to advance grid modernization

• Traffic optimization efforts

• Electric vehicle and battery technology improvements.

Allocation requests in 2021 exceeded Eagle's capacity by more than 200%, and plans to replace it were already well underway, along with upgrades to the Insight Center.

Kestrel Brings a 100% Clean Energy Future Into Focus

When Eagle's replacement, named Kestrel, came online in early 2023, it delivered five times more computing capacity with approximately 44 petaflops of computing power. The new Hewlett Packard Enterprise system also features a bigger and better set of graphics processing units, further increasing capacity and accelerating the time to solution for models.

Text version

Like the small but mighty falcon it is named after, Kestrel is sharp-sighted, smart, and fast. Those qualities will be instrumental in NREL's ability to leverage cutting-edge capabilities, from AI and machine learning to advanced data visualization, to build on the progress of the past decade and augment the impact of successive HPC investments.

Combined with the latest NREL-developed modeling innovations, such as Advanced Research on Integrated Energy Systems, Simulation and Emulation for Advanced Systems, and Sienna, these new HPC capabilities will enable NREL researchers to bring a 100% carbon-pollution-free future into focus with speed and precision.

"We now have unprecedented access to data information measurements coming from electric power grids," Kroposki said. "And we can use advanced machine learning techniques to extract salient points from these massive amounts of data, enhance how we model power systems, and learn responses to situations to help power system operators improve operations in real time."

Onward and Upward

Kroposki has seen NREL's grid integration work evolve from adding tiny amounts of wind and solar to small stand-alone systems to charting viable pathways to 100% renewable electricity.

"When I started, I'd get laughed out of rooms for even bringing up 2% wind and solar," he said. "And in the last decade, we've seen tremendous strides and utilities announcing 100% clean energy goals."

A decade ago, little in the existing energy landscape foreshadowed such a seismic shift, much less the meteoric rise of renewables. Coal supplied the lion's share of U.S. electricity. By contrast, solar and wind generated less than 3% combined. Even in the best-case scenario NREL had considered at that point, renewable energy might generate 80% of U.S. electricity by 2050.

Now the findings of the 2012 Renewable Energy Futures Study-which struck many industry experts as overly optimistic then-seem conservative in light of recent scientific advances and current market realities. Today, a quarter of U.S. electricity comes from renewable resources, primarily solar and wind. And coal's share has plummeted by more than half, a trend that is expected to continue.

We have crossed the threshold, and the journey continues. There are obstacles to overcome and decisions to be made-smart decisions driven by hard data. And time is of the essence.

As HPC systems continue to scale by orders of magnitude in the decade ahead, NREL researchers can look forward to adding even more complexity to their models and simulations, solving bigger problems faster, and increasing the momentum of the energy transition.

Learn more about computational research at NREL.