operated by the Alliance for Sustainable Energy, LLC. NREL’s Power Systems Engineering Center published 47 journal and magazine articles in the past year highlighting recent research in grid modernization. For information about these or other NREL articles or reports, please contact me or the author(s). NREL acknowledges the U.S. Department of Energy for the funding support that made this resea...

The NREL PVWatts R © calculator is a web application developed by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) that estimates the electricity production of a gridconnected photovoltaic system based on a few simple inputs. PVWatts combines a number of sub-models to predict overall system performance, and includes several built-in parameters that are hidden from the user. This technical refere...

Accurate quantification of carbohydrate content of biomass is crucial for many bio-refining applications. The standardised NREL two stage complete acid hydrolysis protocol was evaluated for its suitability towards seaweeds, as the protocol was originally developed for lignocellulosic feedstocks. The compositional differences between the major polysaccharides in seaweeds and terrestrial plants, ...

the winD inDustry has experienceD a rapid expansion. As wind farms are aging, their operations and maintenance issues are gaining in significance. The wind industry has been affected by failures of wind turbine components such as main bearings, gearboxes, and generators. Replacement of failed components results in the high cost in energy production. Therefore, research in fault identification a...

A chemical-bath treatment that does not form a CdS layer has been used on CIGS absorbers made at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). The resultant cells have moderate to high efficiency, with improved current collection at shorter wavelengths. Room temperature quantum efficiency (QE) and capacitance-voltage (CV) results indicate that the different surface treatments yield electro-o...

We present a unique evaluation of three advanced high throughput pretreatment and enzymatic hydrolysis systems (HTPH-systems) for screening of lignocellulosic biomass for enzymatic saccharification. Straw from 20 cultivars of winter wheat from two sites in Denmark was hydrothermally pretreated and enzymatically processed in each of the separately engineered HTPH-systems at 1) University of Cali...

The reliability of cellulose hydrolysis models is studied using the NREL model. An identifiability analysis revealed that only 6 out of 26 parameters are identifiable from the available data (typical hydrolysis experiments). Attempting to identify a higher number of parameters (as done in the original NREL model) results in significant errors on the parameter estimates. The reasons of this poor...

This paper describes the structural testing of two NedWind 25, 12-m blades at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). The tests were conducted under the Standards, Measurement and Testing (SMT) Program in conjunction with tests conducted by four European laboratories to develop a common database of blade testing methods. All of the laboratories tested duplicate copies of blades taken f...

Wind resource in the continental and offshore United States has been reconstructed and characterized using metrics that describe, apart from abundance, its availability, persistence and intermittency. The Modern Era Retrospective-Analysis for Research and Applications (MERRA) boundary layer flux data has been used to construct wind profile at 50 m, 80 m, 100 m, 120 m turbine hub heights. The wi...