CRADA Report

NREL/TP-7A1-48423

August 2010

JouleLabs Cooperative Research 

and Development Agreement

Cooperative Research and Development 

Final Report

CRADA Number: CRD-08-00276

NREL Technical Contact: Dan Bilello
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Cooperative Research and Development Final Report

In accordance with Requirements set forth in Article XI.A(3) of the CRADA document, this document is 

the final CRADA report, including a list of Subject Inventions, to be forwarded to the Office of Science

and Technical Information as part of the commitment to the public to demonstrate results of federally 

funded research.

CRADA number: CRD-08-00301

CRADA Title: JouleLabs Cooperative Research and Development Agreement

Parties to the Agreement: Joule Labs, Inc. + NREL

Joint Work Statement Funding Table showing DOE commitment:

Estimated Costs NREL 

Shared Resources

Year 1 $ 149,000.00

Year 2 $ 50,000.00

Year 3 $ 50,000.00

TOTALS $ 249,000.00

Abstract of CRADA work:

The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and Joule Labs Inc. (Joule Labs) will collaborate on 

creating a software platform for the development and distribution of renewable energy and energy 

efficiency analysis tools. The platform will streamline the development of advanced analysis tools and 

provide significant commercial value to users of the tools.

Summary of Research Results:

The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and Joule Labs Inc. (Joule Labs) collaborated on 

creating elements of a software platform for the development and distribution of renewable energy and 

energy efficiency analysis tools – specifically building upon the Renewable Energy Optimization (REO) 

tool. The platform provided a proof of concept version incorporating wind and solar PV technology 

module as well as a “site module” that makes use of either one or both of the PV and Wind modules to 

estimate Lifecycle cost, Dispatch, 25 yr cash-flows, and Internal Rate of Return (IRR). JouleLabs 

integrated the REO data model into JouleLabs common model to calculate lifecycle costs for PV and 

wind. The code provided by NREL also enabled Joule to calculate rate of return on based on input 
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technology sizes. JouleLabs also developed a complete online Service Delivery Platform with its own 

elastic compute cloud to serve as the basis for their own commercial tool. 

Research contributions and improvements benefiting NREL and the REO tool development overall under 

this effort included:

1) Service to automatically extract required renewable energy resource information from multiple GIS 

Databases;

2) Service to automatically extract incentives data from incentives database; and,

3) Life Cycle Cost module to calculate the present value of future cash flows.

These improvements reduce the time to process resource and incentives data for a large number of 

locations. Manual data extraction costs $200/site, which is inexpensive for just a few sites but 

expensive for projects that involve several hundred sites. 

Subject Inventions listing: None.

Report Date: 4/30/10 Responsible Technical Contact at Alliance/NREL: Bilello, Dan

This document contains NO confidential, protectable, or proprietary information.