Upping Renewables - NREL's New Weapon: A Conversation with Dan Arvizu


 
Author: Martin Rosenberg
Location: New York
Date: 2013-03-12

As many utilities look to increase their wind and solar generation, they need to know how to best mix the power in with other sources of electricity. The U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colo., is completing a new test facility, powered by sophisticated computers, to model how utilities can make increased use of renewables without hurting reliability. Dan Arvizu, NREL director, talked with me about the project and its importance.

ENERGYBIZ: Will utility managers come here to run tests? Or could they use the test facility remotely?

ARVIZU: We intend for the facility to be as user-friendly as possible. Depending on what part of the system they’re interested in, they might have to come here to load their simulation software or connect to our system. We’re still thinking through the process of what experiments can be run and what the business model looks like.

ENERGYBIZ: Where do you think you can make your mark with the facility?

ARVIZU: We plan to have the biggest impact with the scale-up of alternative energy technologies in the United States.

ENERGYBIZ: How fast can renewables grow domestically in an era of abundant, cheap natural gas and flat power demand?

ARVIZU: Independent of these dynamics, including natural gas expansion, the future demands a more diversified portfolio. Right now, more than half of new generation is natural gas-fired. The other half is mostly renewables of all kinds. We expect this trend to continue for perhaps the next 20 years.

ENERGYBIZ: Describe the complex computer modeling you will be doing here.

ARVIZU: For the high-performance computing capability we envision, we need to collaborate with the private sector, so we didn’t just buy a computer, we formed a partnership. In this case, our relationship is with HP and with Intel, who intend to pull together a new class of product. They see a big market for this type of capability. This is a partnership that will continue to evolve over time. We’re doing this in phases. We’ll put in the first basic part of the system and build it up to a very fast petaflop machine capable of 1 million billion calculations per second. This machine will allow us to run very complex codes that simulate a real-world grid operation, virtually, and will let us ask a lot of technology-specific questions and model potential technology performance.

ENERGYBIZ: What exactly will you do for utilities?

ARVIZU: We want to be able to import their real-world data. Many of them don’t know in detail how these renewable systems are impacting certain aspects of their own grid.

ENERGYBIZ: So what’s the potential growth of renewables, and how will this facility help speed that up?

ARVIZU: We’re all about acceleration. Utility companies need to reduce the risk of ramping up this part of their portfolios. They’re not going to scale anything up if they don’t understand it.

To subscribe or visit go to:  http://www.riskcenter.com

http://riskcenter.com/articles/story/view_story?story=99915116