NREL: A Year in Clean Energy Innovations

A Review of NREL’s Feature Stories

National Renewable

Energy Laboratory

Innovation for Our Energy Future

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National Renewable

Energy Laboratory

National Renewable

Energy Laboratory

Innovation for Our Energy Future

NationalRenewable Energy Laboratory

Innovation for Our Energy Future

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NationalRenewable Energy Laboratory

Innovation for Our Energy Future

NREL is a national laboratory of the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, operated by the Alliance for Sustainable Energy, LLC.
Cover photos: Left: NREL has dispatched clean energy experts to Hawaii and Alaska to work as advisors

to local policymakers and utilities. See story on page 34. Courtesy of Hawaiian Electric Light Company.

Center: NREL Senior Scientist Michael Crowley created an animated model of Cel7A, nature’s primary enzyme 

for decaying plants. Computer-aided modeling similar to this is helping NREL researchers look for faster ways 

to make cellulosic ethanol. See story on page 18. Credit: Pat Corkery. Right: Senior engineers at NREL are 

expanding a research partnership with operators, utilities, and turbine manufacturers to increase long-term 

wind gearbox reliability. See story on page 62. Credit: Joseph B. Verrengia
CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION 1

ADVANCED VEHICLES & FUELS 3

Controlling Heat Key to Hybrid Performance 3

NREL and Ford Team Up to Develop ‘Cool’ Cars 4

NREL Team Tests Higher Ethanol Fuel Mix 6

NREL Works with Truckers to Reduce Fuel Use 8

BASIC SCIENCES 9

NREL Center Turns Materials Design Upside Down 9

Award-Winning Battery’s Secret is ‘Buried’ 11

BIOMASS 13

NREL Helps Set Stringent Biodiesel Standards 13

Partnerships Boost Research, Improve Technology 14

Algae-to-Fuel Research Enjoys Resurgence at NREL 15

Biofuels Studies to Benefit from Better Lab Test 16

NREL Breaks Down Walls for Biofuels 18

BUILDINGS 19

NREL Helps New Orleans Go Green 19

Two Years Later, Greensburg is Officially Green—with NREL’s Help 21

NREL, Industry Work to Halve Building Energy Use 22

Software Helps Design Energy Stingy Buildings 24

CONCENTRATING SOLAR POWER 25

New Solar Technology Concentrates on Cost, Efficiency 25

Weathering System Cuts Product Testing Time 26

Award-Winning Reflector to Cut Solar Cost 28

New Labs to Concentrate on Solar Thermal Energy 30

ELECTRIC INFRASTRUCTURE SYSTEMS 32

Conference Tackles Interstate Transmission 32

ENERGY ANALYSIS 34

NREL Assigns Renewables Experts to Hawaii, Alaska 34

NREL Energy Analysts Dig into Feed-In Tariffs 36

NREL Uncovers Clean Energy Leaders State by State 38

ENVIRONMENT 40

Governor Honors Alternative Energy Advocate 40

Lab Preserves Nature, History 42

FUEL CELLS & HYDROGEN 43

NREL Scientist Finds Time to Do it All 43

Eco-Friendly SUV Gets a Hydrogen Mileage Boost 45

LABORATORY OF THE FUTURE 47

NREL Tests Energy-Saving Office of the Future 47

Recovery Act Money Invested at NREL 48

Labyrinth to Store Energy in Basement for Later Use 49

Recycled Natural Gas Pipes Shore Up Green Building 51

Building Panels Protect, Provide Comfort 52

NREL Sets the Bar for Office Building Energy Use 53

PHOTOVOLTAICS 56

Unique Research Tool Aims to Reduce PV Cost 56

RENEWABLE RESOURCE MAPS & DATA 58

NREL Helps Sort Green Transportation Options 58

On the Road with Alternative Fuels 60

WIND 61

Bigger and Better: Lab Aims to Improve Giant Wind Turbines 61

NREL Gearbox Study Aims to Grease Wind Power’s Future 62

Wind Technology Center Installing a Dynamic Duo 63

Largest Wind R&D Study Underway at NREL 65

COMMUNITY OUTREACH 67

Science Bowl is Fun with a Future 67

Solar, Hydrogen Model Cars Race Toward New Energy Future 68

Vets and ‘Gray Fields’ Go Green with NREL 69

Lawmakers Visit NREL for Clean Energy Solutions 70

NREL Summer Labs Season Science Students 71

NREL Energy Execs Make an Impact Nationally 73

It Takes a Solar Village 75

Generation-Y Start-up Stuns NREL Growth Forum 77

1

INTRODUCTION

The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) is the nation’s primary laboratory for 

renewable energy and energy efficiency research and development.

NREL’s mission and strategy are focused on advancing the U.S. Department of Energy’s and 

our nation’s energy goals. The laboratory’s scientists and researchers support critical market 

objectives to accelerate research from scientific innovations to market-viable alternative 

energy solutions. At the core of this strategic direction are NREL’s research and technology 

development competencies. These areas span from understanding renewable resources for 

energy, to the conversion of these resources to renewable electricity and fuels, and ultimately 

to the use of renewable electricity and fuels in homes, commercial buildings, and vehicles.

What follows is a compilation of articles featuring NREL research and development, 

deployment, commercialization, and outreach activities in 2009. The feature stories can be 

found online at http://www.nrel.gov/features/.

Questions about these articles should be directed to NREL’s Public Affairs Office by calling 

303-275-4090 or sending an e-mail to public.affairs@nrel.gov.

NREL facilities on South Table Mountain in Golden, Colorado. Credit: Pat Corkery/PIX 16911
2
ADVANCED VEHICLES & FUELS

3

CONTROLLING HEAT KEY TO

HYBRID PERFORMANCE

NREL senior engineer Ken Kelly monitors testing of a Toyota

hybrid system drive. Kelly’s group is developing ways to transfer 

heat from the system’s electronics in order to improve efficiency

and extend the component’s life. Credit: Pat Corkery/PIX 16586

F

rom Tokyo to Detroit, the buzz on the 2009 auto show

circuit is all about really new cars—plug-in hybrids,

gas-electric hybrids, electric cars, and more.

Chrysler has two new concepts. Honda has four. Mercedes 

Benz has four, including one that would be powered by a

fuel cell. Chevy will begin production of its plug-in electric 

Volt in 2010, and is working with cities now to prepare

charging stations.

Together they suggest a very different transportation lineup

in the next decade.

At NREL, engineers are exploring several ways to improve 

hybrid performance to such a convincing level that millions

of commuters will make the switch.

To the lab, that means increasing the vehicles’ range to 100 

mpg or more, improving reliability, and reducing costs—all 

while operating with drastically reduced tailpipe emissions.

“The real answer isn’t Detroit making the right car but

the consumer deciding they want the right car,” said Rob

Farrington, manager of NREL’s advanced vehicles program. 

In the Advanced Electronics Laboratory, research engineers

are exploring key components of the electric drive systems. 

Their ground-floor windowless research unit is about the

size of a large suburban garage. There isn’t an intact car in 

sight, however. 

Instead, researchers are testing key power components at 

bench stations, including motor controllers, AC to DC converters, and inverters that condition the electrical signal between

the power generation unit (a fuel cell or battery) and the

electric motor to provide power to various components.

Greater than the Sum

No single improvement will make the difference. But combined, the results can help automakers overcome technical

barriers can delay the successful commercialization of 

advanced vehicles.

“About one-third of the incremental cost of hybrids is in its 

power electronics,” said senior engineer Ken Kelly, task leader 

for the advanced electronics lab. “We need to process that 

electricity in ways that are reliable and extend the range of the 

vehicle. That’s what this lab is all about.”

On one bench, engineers are testing the performance of a

Toyota hybrid system drive. It already works at 90% efficiency. 

But heat is an enemy; the vehicle’s efficiency dips as the coolant temperature increases.

If it could run cooler, it would run longer. And it could be 

manufactured using less expensive materials.

Kelly’s group is experimenting with heat exchangers made of 

different layers, including graphite and indium.

“One-third of your radiator’s capacity is used to cool the 

vehicle’s electronics,” Kelly said. “People want to package 

things smaller and powerfully. That means there is more heat 

in a small space. So the challenge is growing to get heat from 

the device to the coolant.”

All in the Grease

In a separate heat-related experiment, senior engineer Sreekant 

Narumanchi is exploring advanced materials for the interface 

between power electronics components.

Silicon chips in power electronics typically rest on a metal base 

plate that conducts heat away from the chip. Coolant flows 

underneath the plate to carry away the heat. The heat transfer 

is aided by a very thin layer of “grease” spread between the 

parts.

“Even though the layers fit together, there are little gaps 

that cause resistance to the transfer of heat,” Narumanchi 

explained. “The grease is used to close those gaps.

It’s a much better conductive pathway than air.”

Automakers don’t use conventional grease containing animal 

fats; typically it’s a silicon gel containing aluminum particles 

and other inorganics. The gels’ performance eventually suffers 

under the heat and pressure generated inside the engine in 

harsh conditions such as summertime rush hour traffic. 

In extended tests, Narumanchi is precisely testing new gels 

that include different metals, graphite, and even advanced 

ingredients such as carbon nanotubes.

The bench-scale equipment simulates years of high-temperature conditions and temperature cycling over weeks.

“Our target is a material that will perform for 15 years,” he said.

— Joseph B. Verrengia (Feb. 20, 2009)
4

NREL AND FORD TEAM UP

TO DEVELOP ‘COOL’ CARS

Solar lights in NREL’s Vehicle Climate Control Laboratory help

simulate heating of cars and assist researchers in finding more

efficient ways to cool cars. Credit: Heather Lammers/PIX 16869

S

ummer in the city” means settling into a hot car, cranking 

the air conditioning and hoping the sun will duck behind 

a cloud while you wait to cool off. What you may not 

know is how much energy and gasoline it takes to cool a sunsoaked automobile on a hot summer day.

A 2002 NREL analysis discovered that 

the United States uses 7 billion gallons 

of fuel per year for light-duty vehicle 

air conditioning. It takes roughly 9.5% 

of U.S. imported crude to produce this 

much gasoline. 

“When operating the air conditioning 

system to cool down your car, it is the 

largest auxiliary energy drain on cars 

today,” says Senior Engineer John Rugh. 

“If we can lessen the amount of fuel used to power A/C, we 

can realize significant reductions in our oil and fuel usage.”

In December 2008, a project to study and develop highefficiency thermoelectric heating and cooling systems for cars 

was announced by the U. S. Department of Energy (DOE). 

As partners in the project, NREL will team up with Ford to 

research efficient ways of cooling vehicles based on the science 

of thermoelectrics. This public-private collaboration is possible 

thanks to a cooperative research and development agreement 

or CRADA.

NREL is a key partner in the Ford CRADA because NREL has 

been working for years to understand how cooling techniques 

affect fuel use as well as thermal comfort. NREL has key 

knowledge and tools that will be instrumental in the thermoelectric cooling system research.

NREL’s Vehicle Climate Control Laboratory is... Hot

Imagine sitting your car under a row of intense lights typically 

used to illuminate sports stadiums—just to see how hot your 

car can get. That’s essentially what happens to a passenger car 

in NREL’s Vehicle Climate Control Laboratory (VCCL). 

The VCCL was developed to simulate the heating that takes 

place as the passenger cabin is exposed to sunlight, changing 

temperatures and humidity—all while the cabin interior is 

cooled using an air conditioning system monitored by sensors 

linked to a computer. 

“The reason the VCCL is such a great lab is that we can consistently create the effects of the sun warming a car, study the 

climate that is created and repeat as needed,” Rugh said.

But having a warm car is only half the equation, it doesn’t 

matter how hot it gets as long as no one needs to be in the car. 

Meet ADAM, the VCCL’s most sophisticated test subject. 

ADAM is the ADvanced Automotive Manikin, which means 

he is basically a human sized sensor that measures heat at

120 independently controlled zones. As ADAM “sweats” or 

“shivers,” corresponding data goes into a computer model 

that simulates human responses. 

“ADAM is an ideal test subject because we don’t have the 

safety issues of exposing a living person to the heat of a car 

and because he’s very consistent. We can repeat tests all day 

long without him getting tired,” Rugh said.

The physiological model that controls 

ADAM is linked to another NREL computer model that predicts human comfort 

in various temperature settings. Working 

with researchers at University of California, Berkeley, NREL developed a way

to translate data into corresponding 

human comfort levels allowing researchers to surmise how cool a car will need to

be in order for passengers to reach a base 

level of comfort.

NREL Looks at How to Take a Load Off

NREL’s Vehicle Ancillary Load Reduction team has previously evaluated technologies that reduce the amount of fuel 

used for automobile air-conditioning. NREL looks to improve 

vehicle efficiency and fuel economy by controlling the

climate in a vehicle while keeping passengers comfortable.

“If we can lessen the amount 

of fuel used to power A/C, 

we can realize significant 

reductions in our oil and

fuel usage.” – John Rugh
NREL Engineer Charlie King works with ADAM, the ADvanced Automotive Manikin. If the research proceeds as planned, ADAM will be 

used to help determine how to cool the people in the car rather 

than cooling the car itself. Heather Lammers/aPIX 16272

ADVANCED VEHICLES & FUELS

5

The theory behind thermoelectric heating and cooling dates 

back to the 1800s but has only recently been eyed as a solution 

for cooling cars.

With no moving parts except for the air blower, thermoelectric 

heating or cooling is achieved by providing an electric current 

to a thermoelectric unit. Heat can be generated or removed 

from the passenger compartment depending on the direction 

of the current. The conditioned air is directed where needed. 

Researchers believe this type of system has the potential to 

augment the traditional air conditioning unit and reduce

vehicle fuel use.

One critical benefit of reducing thermal 

loads is that occupants experience lower 

temperatures when entering a heated 

vehicle and feel more comfortable. 

NREL’s research has shown that certain 

technologies, such as solar-reflective 

glass and parked-car ventilation, can 

significantly reduce thermal loads and 

fuel use. Cooling occupants through 

ventilated, cooled, or low-mass seats 

also shows potential for energy savings.

This is why Rugh says that, “all of these 

pieces—from our past research in load 

reduction, to the VCCL and ADAM—

make NREL a strong partner in this 

CRADA and we are excited to helping 

move this research forward and hopefully someday change the way we cool 

our cars.”

What Will Be Explored

The FORD-NREL CRADA won’t kick into high gear until the 

summer of 2009, but according to Rugh, some of the areas the 

research teams will be looking at are:

•	 Analyzing and reducing overall thermal loads when it come 

to vehicle cooling

•	 How the number of thermal electric devices in a car can be 

reduced and to help reduce costs

•	 How to cool the people in the car rather than the car itself 

possibly through strategic vent placement.

The research agreement is set up so 

that work is done in phases and key 

milestone will have to be met before the 

project can continue to the next level, 

which means ADAM may have a little 

waiting to do.

“At first we’ll be working with Visteon 

and Ford to determine the best thermal 

comfort tools each partner has and then 

we’ll select the best ones for the project,” 

Rugh said. “We won’t get to use ADAM 

to test those ideas until the later phases 

of the project.”

— Heather Lammers (April 24, 2009)

“ADAM is an ideal test subject 

because we don’t have the 

safety issues of exposing a 

living person to the heat of 

a car and because he’s very 

consistent. We can repeat 

tests all day long without him 

getting tired.” – John Rugh
6

NREL TEAM TESTS HIGHER 

ETHANOL FUEL MIX

Storage canisters lined up in NREL’s lab hold gas emission from 

cars that got a taste of higher levels of ethanol in the gasoline. 

Study results so far have shown that as ethanol increased, tailpipe emissions stayed largely the same. Credit: Heather Lammers/PIX 16890

G

oing on a diet can be good for you. And maybe a gasoline 

“diet” of traditional fuel blended with increased levels of 

ethanol will be good for the environment and economy 

without hurting conventional cars and small engines. NREL 

researchers are trying to find out, because these new ethanol 

blends could play a significant role as America tries to wean 

itself off petroleum based fuels.

The Energy Independence and Security 

Act of 2007 (EISA) is one force behind the 

quest for higher ethanol blends. The 2007 

law requires that the United States use 36 

billion gallons of renewable fuels by 2022. 

But, a leaner benchmark is just around the 

corner, with 15 billion gallons required 

by 2012. “We’re pushed right now to find 

ways to get more ethanol into the fuel 

stream,” said Keith Knoll, senior project 

leader for NREL’s Fuels Performance 

Group. 

Currently, ethanol is the most widely used and readily available renewable fuel. As a result, it is a likely candidate to make 

up a significant chunk of the 36 billion gallons required under 

EISA. Ethanol as a motor fuel is commonly found in E85, a 

fuel intended for use only in Flexible Fuel Vehicles (FFVs).

Ethanol also is widely used as a 10% blend in standard 

gasoline (E10) to reduce carbon monoxide emissions and 

smog. But, increasing ethanol from the current 10% blend to a 

proposed blend of E15, or even E20, brings up a whole host of 

questions and issues.

For instance, E20 is currently not allowed for use in conventional automobiles under the Environmental Protection 

Agency’s (EPA) Clean Air Act. This is where research from 

NREL and Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) will play 

a pivotal role in understanding how blends like E15 and E20 

affect vehicles currently in the market. The research is examining whether using higher ethanol blends will have an adverse 

impact on tailpipe emissions, exhaust temperatures, catalytic 

converters, and engine performance and durability.

Cars Don’t Seem to Mind

While NREL and ORNL will be studying mid-level ethanol 

blends for some time, data from initial tests on small engines 

and cars was released in October 2008 and updated in February 2009. Follow-up reports addressing other vehicle effects 

will be issued over the coming year. Generally, the tests have 

shown no big surprises or short-term effects when using 

greater blends of ethanol in existing cars.

“So far nothing has jumped out at us and vehicles don’t show 

a significant impact with ethanol blends of 15% and 20%,” 

Knoll said.

The automobiles used in NREL’s test were meant to represent 

a cross section of cars currently in use. The 16 vehicles ranged 

from model years 1999 through 2007 with odometers reading 

from 10,000 to 100,000 miles. 

All vehicles in the test experienced some loss in fuel economy, 

which is expected because ethanol has a lower energy density 

than gasoline. At the E20 blend level, the average reduction in 

miles per gallon was 7.7% when compared to gasoline only. 

“Another issue we looked at was whether there would be 

any unintended consequences on air quality when using the 

higher blends,” Knoll said. 

Study results so far have shown that as 

ethanol increased, tailpipe emissions 

stayed largely the same. There was no significant change in nitrogen oxides or nonmethane organic gas emissions. Carbon 

monoxide emissions declined for all of the 

ethanol blends. There were increases in 

ethanol and acetaldehyde emissions, but 

these were balanced with reductions in 

other hydrocarbon air-toxic emissions.

When it came to how catalytic converters reacted to increased ethanol, results depended on how 

the engine control system regulated the fuel-to-air ratio 

during high power operation such as heavy accelerations or 

long hill climbs. Cars that adapted to the increased ethanol 

during these activities showed no change in catalyst operation—in fact some even ran cooler at higher ethanol blend 

levels. Seven of the 16 vehicles tested were found to not adapt 

“Picture a chainsaw calmly 

idling. But then it suddenly 

starts spinning on its own 

as if someone had goosed 

the throttle.” – Chicago Tribune
ADVANCED VEHICLES & FUELS

7

to higher ethanol blends during high-power operation. For 

these vehicles, catalyst temperatures increased during powerenrichment, running about 29–35°C higher on E20 compared 

to gasoline only. The long-term effects of this temperature 

increase are being investigated in other, ongoing experiments 

also funded by DOE.

“While these initial results are interesting, the next step is 

going to be a larger study, with more vehicles, that will look 

at the long-term effect that ethanol has on catalytic converters 

and numerous other issues like drivability and engine durability,” Knoll said.

Keith Knoll, senior project leader for NREL’s Fuels Performance 

Group, leads the NREL team testing cars and other engines running 

on fuels containing 15–20% percent ethanol. U.S. laws mandate an 

increase in renewable fuel use by 2012. Credit: Heather Lammers/PIX 16891

A Small Engine Can Get Revved

While car engines seem to take the higher ethanol blends 

in stride, the same can’t be said for small non-road engines 

(SNRE). An April 2009 Chicago Tribune article on this subject 

painted an eerie picture, “Picture a chainsaw calmly idling. 

But then it suddenly starts spinning on its own as if someone 

had goosed the throttle.” 

The Chicago Tribune article was a creative, but exaggerated take 

on what was found in the lab. For instance, it was the handheld trimmers that got a little excited in the lab, however, 

“small non-road engines may have trouble with higher blends 

of ethanol,” said Knoll. “This is an area where we need more 

research.”

For this phase of the testing NREL and ORNL used 28 SNREs. 

Small engines don’t have the same feedback control system 

as cars, nor do they have exhaust oxygen sensors. This means 

the engines can’t automatically compensate for the added 

ethanol. So, small engines using higher ethanol blends tended 

to run leaner and hotter. The temperatures of the exhaust 

components, cylinder heads, and cylinders increased. Exhaust 

temperatures rose by 10–50°C when moving from gasoline 

only to E15 and 20–70°C from gasoline only to E20. 

Back to those lawn trimmers. When running on a higher 

ethanol blend, three trimmers did show higher idle speeds 

and sometimes the clutch engaged on its own. However, Knoll 

thinks this is easily overcome. “Small engines can be designed 

to handle differences in fuel. While these engines may not 

handle a 20% change in ethanol, most currently run on E10. 

Future designs could be engineered to operate with whatever 

ethanol standard we move to.”

Don’t read too much into the initial tests for both auto and 

small engines cautioned Knoll, “Although we’ve got good 

data, this was a very small sample that is part of a much

larger program.”

Future Tests and Decisions

The focus for all of this testing is to help policymakers like the 

EPA evaluate and understand the impact that new ethanol 

mixes will have on the existing cars that Americans drive 

every day.

The ethanol industry is currently seeking a waiver from EPA 

that would allow for widespread use of E15 in all automobile 

types. Right now, most gas stations across the country already 

sell blends using 10% ethanol. 

“I think that for a long-term solution our focus for consumers 

is on E85,” Knoll said. “Right now E85 use is limited because 

of the few fueling stations that are available and the limited 

number of flex-fuel vehicles that are on the road. Our research 

will give policymakers sound technical advice to help them 

decide the potential that blends like E15 and E20 will have in 

the marketplace.”

Future mid-level ethanol blend studies will take a further look 

at issues like:

•	 Emission control

•	 Fuel system compatibility

•	 Engine durability

•	 Evaporative emissions

•	 Drivability.

This research is co-led and co-funded by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Biomass Program and the Energy Efficiency 

and Renewable Energy Vehicle Technologies Program with 

technical support from NREL and ORNL. The team is working 

closely with representatives from the EPA, U.S. auto manufacturers, engine companies, oil companies, and Battelle Memorial Institute to develop and conduct a robust test program.

— Heather Lammers ( Sept. 18, 2009)
8

NREL WORKS WITH TRUCKERS

TO REDUCE FUEL USE

NREL Senior Project Leader Ken Proc examines sensors that

measure the outside ambient temperature and compare it to

the temperature in truck cabs. Credit: Pat Corkery PIX 16811

B

eing “green” can have positive impacts on your pocket 

book, and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory 

(NREL) is working with one industry to find ways to 

shave $3 billion a year in fuel costs.

Like many, the trucking industry has been hit with increased 

costs from rising fuel prices and higher maintenance. Excessive idling of trucks has been identified as a source of wasted 

fuel, and an unnecessary expenditure. Surveys estimate that 

sleeper trucks idle an average of more than 1,400 hours annually consuming more than 800 million gallons of fuel at a cost 

to the industry of approximately $3 billion per year for longhaul trucks.

However, truckers have good reasons for idling their trucks—

driver comfort. “Truckers typically idle trucks while at mandated rest period to get either air conditioning or heat,” NREL 

Senior Project Leader Ken Proc said. “NREL is looking for ways 

to reduce the thermal load in trucks, possibly enabling a battery 

or other energy storage solution to be used for comfort control 

rather than running the truck engine the whole time. Reducing 

the amount of truck engine idling can significantly reduce fuel 

consumption, save money, and also reduce tailpipe emissions.”

This summer, NREL researchers began two new cooperative 

research and development agreements (CRADAs), with truck 

manufacturers Kenworth (a division of PACCAR) and Volvo 

Trucks North America. These teams will work with researchers in NREL’s Center for Transportation Technologies and 

Systems (CTTS) to find ways improve thermal efficiency in 

truck sleeper cabins as part of the “CoolCab task.”

For CoolCab, reducing the heating or cooling load is the first 

step in improving a long-haul truck cab’s efficiency to reduce 

overall fuel consumption. A secondary objective of the program is to decrease heating and cooling loads while a truck is 

on the road. This load reduction also might help improve fuel 

economy. Long-term goals for the CRADA include working 

with industry to design a newer, more efficient truck cab with 

energy saving heating and cooling systems that keep the cab 

comfortable without the need for engine idling.

According to Proc, some thermal storage solutions store cooling 

energy while driving down the road, basically by making ice. 

When resting, the system discharges that frosted air into the 

cabin. But NREL researchers identified a need for more options. 

“Since starting the initial evaluation into existing idle reduction technologies, we found some pretty good heating solutions,” Proc said. “But, on the cooling side, the solutions just 

weren’t getting it done. And, we launched CoolCab because 

we saw a need to improve this.”

First, a Little “Soak”ing

“We began our CoolCab testing with solar soaks to quantify 

the amount of heat the truck cabs absorb during the day from 

the sun,” Proc said. The bulk of data being collected by NREL 

is temperature measurements. Numerous sensors measure the 

outside ambient temperature compared to the temperature in 

the truck cab. The cabs are also heated while temperatures are 

monitored to determine an “R” value of thermal resistance for 

the cab. NREL infrared testing also is used to identify potential areas to reduce heating and cooling loads with improved 

insulation. The infrared cameras showed the greatest heat loss 

around windows, seams, and other areas within the cab where 

insulation is lacking.

CoolCalc Creates a New Model

All of the data collected from the trucks will be used to 

validate CoolCalc, a new computer modeling program in 

development at NREL. CoolCalc works with the user-friendly 

SketchUp program, a 3D modeling program available from 

Google. Recently, NREL developed a program called Open 

Studio to help building designers create energy efficient buildings. Working off the same EnergyPlus data files, CoolCalc will 

help researchers simulate energy use in long-haul truck cabs. 

“NREL researchers will be using our new CoolCalc tool to 

model, test, and analyze truck cabin heating and cooling 

loads,” Proc said. Team members will be able to input key 

information like the size and shape of the truck and climate 

conditions. The program will estimate the existing thermal 

loads as well as provide estimates for reducing the thermal 

loads. NREL will then work with its industry partners to test 

the CoolCalc results on vehicles in production. 

Although seeing changes in commercial long-haul truck cabs 

will take years, there will be initial results such as insulation 

and the use of window screening that truckers will be able to 

implement immediately and help take a load off their costs.

“Independent owner/operators can be early adopters of some 

of our findings because it can directly affect their bottom line 

as well as their comfort level,” Proc said. “And, many fleet 

owners have a corporate desire to be green and reduce their 

carbon footprint.”

— Heather Lammers (Dec. 11, 2009)
BASIC SCIENCES

9

NREL CENTER TURNS MATERIALS 

DESIGN UPSIDE DOWN

The same set of atoms can have starkly

different properties depending on their

arrangement in space, says Center for

Inverse Design Director Alex Zunger.

Credit: Pat Corkery/PIX 16760

L

ike most everything else we take for granted in the

macroscopic world, the logic of design breaks down in

the quantum realm. 

Most designers, be they architects, hair stylists, or aerospace 

engineers, start with a concept of the end product (buildings, 

coiffures, fighter jets) and work backward toward the building 

blocks and actions required to realize the images crystallized 

in their minds.

Materials scientists seeking new semiconductors, superconductors, lasers, sensors, magnets, and alloys have worked in 

opposite fashion. Generally they stumble 

across a new material in nature or via 

laboratory happenstance and then try 

to figure out its physical properties and 

potential uses. Such reliance on accidental discovery is “actually very pathetic,” 

concludes Dr. Alex Zunger, a materials 

theorist and Research Fellow at the U.S. 

Department of Energy’s (DOE) National 

Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL).

“The development of a technology based 

on accidentally discovered materials 

normally takes about 20 years because it 

takes a long time to figure out what is it exactly

that we discovered by accident,” Zunger said.

Starting with a ‘Dream’

He directs the NREL-led Center for Inverse Design, a $4 

million-a-year for 5 years research endeavor aiming to turn 

materials design on its head. The center’s success could 

accelerate the pace of materials discovery and trigger leaps 

in performance and efficiency in everything from sensors to 

lasers to solar panels.

The center is a collaboration among NREL, Northwestern 

University, Oregon State University, and the SLAC National 

Accelerator Laboratory, which Stanford University operates 

for DOE. It is just beginning operations.

The starting point will be articulating what would the properties of a “dream material,” as Zunger puts it. For transistor 

applications, a dream material will allow extreme electron 

mobility; for photovoltaics it would resist deterioration while 

allowing greater absorption of incoming light. 

“Everybody has a dream material in mind that doesn’t exist,” 

Zunger said. “Most of us have resigned ourselves to the fact 

that life is tough and we’re not going to get our dream.” 

But, Zunger hopes to make the dreams of material scientists 

come true.

Atoms’ Arrangement Matters

The fundamental insight behind the Center for Inverse Design 

is that the same set of atoms can have starkly different properties depending on their arrangement in space. Diamonds and 

graphite are both elemental carbon. But graphite is soft and 

black—the stuff of pencil leads—while diamonds are hard 

and transparent and star in engagement rings. The difference 

is how the carbon atoms arrange themselves, which in turn 

dictates electron behavior. Electrons, the quantum drama’s 

lead actors, dictate a material’s hardness, chemical reactivity, 

and how it reflects or absorbs light, transports electrons, and 

so forth.

The Center for Inverse Design will 

work in three main steps.

First, Zunger and colleagues in NREL’s 

Solid State Theory Group will envision a realistic “dream material” for 

which there is a clear need. They then 

will use supercomputers running 

NREL-developed genetic algorithms—

mathematical routines capable of 

learning as they go—to come up with 

a manageable number of variations on 

a recipe of atoms. An example might 

be a semiconductor with specific optical properties consisting of 25% aluminum arsenide molecules and 75% 

gallium arsenide molecules stacked in 

whatever arrangement that would produce the targeted optical behavior. With just 64 atoms capable 

of producing roughly 500 trillion possible atomic layouts, 

“The development of a 

technology based on 

accidentally discovered 

materials normally takes about 

20 years because it takes a

long time to figure out what

is it exactly that we discovered 

by accident.” – Alex Zunger
10

genetic algorithms capable of focusing quickly on the most 

promising combinations are indispensable. 

Next, Zunger’s team of NREL theorists will pass some of the 

semifinalists to NREL Research Fellow David Ginley’s group, 

which specializes in combinatorial chemistry. “Combi,” as 

Ginley calls it, is an automated, highthroughput approach to material 

synthesis, allowing scientists to create 

hundreds of variations on a chemical 

theme at once. Such synthesis involves 

the creation of crystal superlattices, in 

which single layers of atoms are applied 

using lasers or molecular beams. “We do 

libraries of materials and see whether 

the area theory highlights look interesting,” Ginley said.

Third, Ginley’s team will pass promising 

samples on to the specialists at Oregon State, Northwestern 

and Stanford, who are, as Zunger put it “the best growers in 

the world” of phase-pure crystal superlattices. 

A Lot of Back-and-Forth

“Many of the materials that we plan to examine have not 

previously been synthesized,” said Douglas Keszler, distinguished professor at Oregon State and one of the center’s principal investigators. “In some cases, we will need to develop 

new growth methods and techniques to strictly control compositions and structures.”

Zunger expects a lot of back-and-forth. The combi team may 

find a theorists’ top choice impossible to make, for example, or 

find that, in the physical world, materials on the lower rungs 

of the theorists’ draft board show greater promise than the 

assumed top prospects.

“My role is to take an astronomical 

number of possibilities, and, without 

visiting all of them, find where the 

answer might reside in that space,” 

Zunger said. “Then I’ll throw it to the 

experimentalists, and they’ll throw 

something back.”

Without advances in combinatorial 

chemistry and computing power 

over the past decade, the Center for 

Inverse Design would never have been 

possible, Zunger said. But the real 

enabler was in the realm of theoretical physics—in particular, 

advances in density functional theory, he said.

“It permitted us to cast the good old equations of quantum 

mechanics in ways that are useable and give us numerical 

results.” 

— Todd Neff (Aug. 14, 2009)

“My role is to take an astronomical 

number of possibilities, and, 

without visiting all of them, find 

where the answer might reside

in that space.” – Alex Zunger
BASIC SCIENCES

11

AWARD-WINNING BATTERY’S 

SECRET IS ‘BURIED’

NREL scientists Ed Tracy, left, Roland Pitts, right, and Dane

Gillaspie, rear, pose in the lab where they continue to work

on improving the award-winning buried-anode battery.

Credit: Joe Poellot/PIX 16888

A

n innovative microbattery based on a National Renewable 

Energy Laboratory (NREL) team’s inspired digression is 

already bringing home major awards. But those involved 

with the buried anode thin-film rechargeable battery’s ongoing development say the technology 

holds greatest promise as a building 

block for big batteries powering automobiles and storing power generated 

by wind, solar, and other renewable 

energy systems.

The PowerPlane UX, a coin-cell-sized 

battery produced by Planar Energy 

Devices based on NREL’s patented 

design, recently won the World Technology Network’s 2009 energy award. 

The battery was also counted among 

R&D Magazine’s 2009 R&D 100, 

viewed in industry as the “Oscars 

of Innovation.” It was one of three 2009 R&D 100 awards for 

NREL scientists and one of 45 such awards the national lab’s 

scientists have earned since NREL opened in 1977.

To understand why NREL and Orlando, Florida-based Planar 

are attracting such attention, it helps to understand a bit about 

batteries. 

Batteries work through chemistry. The simplest battery 

contains two electrodes—a negatively-charged anode and a 

positively charged cathode—plus an electrolyte. Since their 

invention in the 19th century, the vast majority of batteries 

have contained liquid electrolytes, as everything from leadacid car batteries to lithium-ion laptop computer batteries 

still do today. When the battery’s circuit closes, the metal 

electrodes launch into chemical reactions in the electrolyte 

that spawn electrons. The electrons flee the anode in search 

of the cathode, only to find themselves devoured by various 

lights, motors, and electronics along the way. Primary batteries—single-use throwaways—expire when the chemical fuel 

runs out. Rechargeables allow a reverse current to rewind the 

chemical cycle.

Two Innovations Key to New Battery

The NREL-developed buried-anode lithium-ion battery hinges 

on two key innovations. The first was a materials science 

breakthrough by U.S. Department of Energy scientist John 

Bates’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory team in 1991. They 

developed the first thin film solid electrolyte using a glass 

called lithium phosphate oxynitride, or LiPON. A solidstate lithium-ion battery was now possible, which promised 

increased safety (lithium-ion batteries with liquid electrolytes 

have been known to cook themselves in a process called 

thermal runaway, which yields flaming gases) while enabling 

production using processes familiar to the microelectronics 

industry. Solid-state lithium-ion batteries also can tolerate 

extreme temperatures and can be recharged thousands of 

times, subsequent testing has shown.

The other innovation, a process-engineering breakthrough, 

involved three NREL scientists in a group specializing in electrochromic technologies that dynamically control transmitted 

light in high-performance windows. Although the connection 

with batteries may seem tenuous, “thin-film electrochromics 

are nothing more than poor batteries that change color,” as Ed 

Tracy, an NREL senior scientist, explained it.

In late 1999, Tracy and colleagues 

Se-Hee Lee and Ping Liu had recently 

wrapped up a battery project when 

they came up with the idea that 

eventually became the buried-anode 

thin-film battery.

Oak Ridge had made a solid-state 

battery comprised of three thin layers. 

On the top was the anode, in the 

middle was the electrolyte, and below 

that was the cathode. The anode, rich 

in lithium, had to be shielded from 

the outside world or it would corrode 

quickly from moisture in the air. 

Process Cut by a Third

At NREL, Lee, Liu, and Tracy decided to try applying the 

LiPON electrolyte first, then layering the cathode over it. 

There was no anode at all. But the cathode contained a 

lithium compound. When a charge was applied, the lithium 

in the cathode migrated through the glass electrolyte and 

formed a metal layer on the other side—that is, the battery 

“The ultimate aim is to be able to 

use the same process technologies 

to inexpensively make a wide range 

of batteries for a wide range of 

vertical markets.” – Roland Pitts
12

“manufactured” its own lithium anode. Not only that, the 

anode was buried under the glass electrolyte such that the 

atmosphere couldn’t touch it.

They came in on a Saturday and made a battery. The following 

week, they tested it, then broke the news to their group leader, 

NREL Senior Scientist Roland Pitts, who liked it despite its 

lack of application in high-end office windows. In addition 

to avoiding corrosion, the approach 

would make solid-state battery manufacturing easier.

“The battery itself is three layers, but 

we form it by making just two layers,” 

Pitts said. “So we get rid of a third of 

the process and that’s pretty cool.” 

But without an industrial partner—

and being somewhat far afield from 

their day-to-day electrochromics 

work—the new battery was shelved 

for five years. The patent on the technology issued in 2004. 

Soon thereafter, the buried-anode lithium-ion battery attracted 

the interest of Battelle Ventures, which brought in serial entrepreneur M. Scott Faris to help with assessment of the business 

potential. In 2007, Faris launched Planar Energy Devices as a 

NREL spin-off to commercialize the technology. Pitts returned 

to NREL in 2009 from a two-year sabbatical to serve as the 

company’s chief science officer, and NREL continues to work 

with Planar on technology development.

The small PowerPlane battery holds huge potential as a building 

block for bigger batteries for power tools, renewable-energy storage 

and electric and hybrid vehicles. Analysts predict the battery market 

will grow by billions of dollars in the next five years.

Courtesy of Planar Energy Devices/PIX 16889

Big Plans for Tiny Battery

Despite the microbattery’s promise in such applications as 

wireless remote sensors, Planar is thinking big—to markets 

for power tools, renewable-energy storage, and electric and 

hybrid vehicle batteries, which analysts predict will grow by 

billions of dollars in the next five years. Planar expects to have 

large-scale buried-anode batteries on the market in two years, 

says Andrea Wesser, the Planar product 

manager for the new battery technology. 

Further process innovations will be crucial to entering such markets, she said. 

One of the key changes will be replacing 

LiPON with a new solid-state electrolyte—one that needn’t be applied in a 

vacuum chamber. Vacuum chambers 

sharply increase production costs while 

limiting battery size, she said. 

“Once you remove it from the vacuum 

chamber, you can introduce solid-state 

batteries into all applications,” she said.

To that end, NREL is working on ways to deposit the buriedanode battery’s cathode material outside a vacuum. Planar is 

doing the same with the electrolyte, Pitts said.

“The ultimate aim is to be able to use the same process technologies to inexpensively make a wide range of batteries for a 

wide range of vertical markets,” Pitts said.

— Todd Neff (Sept. 11, 2009)

“The battery itself is three layers, 

but we form it by making just 

two layers. So we get rid of a 

third of the process and that’s 

pretty cool.” – Roland Pitts
BIOMASS

13

NREL HELPS SET STRINGENT 

BIODIESEL STANDARDS

Robert McCormick examines a biodiesel sample in the Fuel

Chemistry Laboratory. NREL researchers helped revise standards 

for the fuel. Credit: Pat Corkery/PIX 16165

Most drivers don’t have a clue about the percentage of free 

glycerin or Group I and II metals in the biodiesel they 

are pumping into their tanks. But if their vehicles sputter in the breakdown lane, questions about the quality and 

reliability of renewable fuel blends could idle a new industry 

before it gets started.

NREL Principal Engineer on Fuel Performance Robert McCormick says biodiesel quality is improving rapidly in the United 

States, with large producers consistently meeting specifications. However, some small producers still have trouble meeting national standards.

McCormick and Senior Engineer Teresa Alleman served as significant contributors to revised biofuels specifications recently 

published by ASTM International (formerly the American Society for Testing and Materials). Research conducted by NREL 

provided the technical basis for setting the new standards. 

McCormick and other collaborators also have co-authored the 

2008 edition of the Biodiesel Handling and Use Guide.

The rigorous ASTM process yielded stringent specifications to 

help ensure the availability of high quality biodiesel blends in 

the marketplace and bolster automaker support and consumer 

demand for biodiesel.

All Blends, All Feedstocks

The new standards are the result of years of research at NREL 

on how the properties of biodiesel blends affect engine performance, and apply to all finished biodiesel blends, regardless of 

the type of feedstock used to make the fuel.

The new standards will quickly play a crucial economic role. 

Diesel-powered trucking delivers 70% of the freight in the 

United States and represents 5% of the U.S. gross domestic 

product, so new fuel blends must prove reliable. 

Several automakers are beginning to sell low-emission, highmileage diesel cars and light trucks in the United States, too. 

“These standards will lead to an expansion of markets for 

biodiesel while at the same time ensuring that users have 

trouble-free performance,” McCormick said.

Biodiesel is manufactured by the transesterification of domestic plant oils, animal fats, and recycled cooking oils. It’s renewable and energy-efficient, and its expanded use displaces 

petroleum-based fuels. It’s cleaner than conventional diesel, 

and can reduce levels of both air toxics and tailpipe emissions 

related to global warming.

The total U.S. production capacity for biodiesel reached million 2.24 million gallons in 2007. 

“Today biodiesel could displace 5% on on-highway diesel 

use,” McCormick said. “With aggressive feedstock development, displacing as much as 25% could be possible over the 

long-term.”

ASTM Standards Protect Engines

Pure biodiesel is known as B100, but many engine parts are 

not compatible with the pure fuel. Burning B100 in an engine 

with incompatible parts can cause fuel system leaks, ruin a fuel 

pump, or clog a filter as the hose material gradually erodes.

At concentrations up to 20%, biodiesel blends can be used 

with minor or no modifications to the equipment. With the 

new specification in place, automakers and engine manufacturers can test B20 and know that consumers will be fueling 

their vehicles with a fuel of the same quality. 

And those tougher specs are leading to improvements. Two 

years ago, half of the 32 biodiesel samples tested in McCormick’s lab failed—what McCormick described as an “unacceptably large fraction” even for a new industry that still is 

experimenting with several different production and refinement methods.

In the most recent NREL tests with 56 producers, reported in 

2008, samples representing nearly 90% of production volume 

met specifications and the major producers hardly ever failed 

the tests.

While a few small and medium producers consistently produced a high quality product, generally the smaller producers continued to have significant failure rates. However, their 

combined production accounts for about 11% of biodiesel 

production. 

The research was jointly supported by the U.S. Department of 

Energy and the National Biodiesel Board under a cooperative 

research and development agreement.

— Joseph B. Verrengia (Jan. 5, 2009)
14

PARTNERSHIPS BOOST RESEARCH, 

IMPROVE TECHNOLOGY

NREL’s John Ashworth, left, and Dan Schell inspect a fermentation tank in the lab’s Alternative Fuels User Facility pilot plant. 

DuPont and NREL researchers worked side-by-side in the facility 

to move biomass conversion technology from the laboratory to 

pilot scale. Credit: Nick Nagle/PIX 13486

S

teve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. Marie and Pierre Curie. 

NREL and DuPont. Sometimes the most efficient path to 

success is to find a partner to work with along the way. 

That’s the basic premise for how NREL collaborates with businesses to help boost the lab’s research and transfer technology into the marketplace. NREL and 

businesses form CRADAs (cooperative 

research and development agreements) 

to help the best minds in business and 

government team up to find solutions 

for alternative energy and fuels.

More than five years ago, NREL and 

the DuPont Corporation entered into 

this type of scientific partnership. The 

goal was to find ways to convert the 

non-food parts of corn plants (also 

known as stover) into biofuels. Corn 

stover is abundant and accessible in 

the United States, so it made sense for 

researchers to see if the non-grain parts of the entire plant 

could be used to make biofuels such as ethanol. But making 

fuel from a corn kernel easily converted to sugar is one thing. 

Making fuel from sugars Mother Nature has locked away to 

protect the plant is another. That’s where NREL and DuPont 

decided to put their heads together.

“What made this CRADA attractive for everyone was that 

NREL already has the intellectual property in several areas 

relating to biomass and DuPont is very good at science,” 

said National Bioenergy Center Team Leader for Partnership 

Development John Ashworth. “So, we knew we could do great 

research together.”

NREL Leverages Turnkey Research

In addition to NREL’s extensive intellectual property, another 

reason companies such as DuPont choose to partner with 

NREL is our in-house expertise in taking ideas from bench 

scale tests all the way to full-blown pilot programs. “Companies don’t have to piece out the research to company X, Y, 

or Z throughout the process,” said Biochemical Process R&D 

Supervisor Richard Elander. “We can also look at one idea 

and eliminate right off the bat the stuff that doesn’t work, and 

that’s another of our strengths as a partner.”

For the first few years, teams for NREL and DuPont worked 

closely coming up with new biomass-to-ethanol processes and 

equipment designs. About a year and a half ago, the NRELDuPont project scaled up from the lab and was successfully 

tested at NREL’s Alternative Fuels User Facility (AFUF) pilot 

plant. Bringing the project to this size and scale often required 

24/7 collaboration with both teams working side-by-side. 

There were a number of factors at play in the NREL-DuPont 

partnership that made things work so well, Ashworth said. 

“CRADAs like this work best when they are true collaborations that push and explore the boundaries of science. When 

companies enter into a CRADA they need to first know where 

they want to end up and, the work needs to be central to their 

business plan.”

Competition Sparks Creativity and Drives Success

As with most partnerships, a little friendly rivalry between 

researchers doesn’t hurt either. “DuPont had a wealth of 

scientific and engineering knowledge they brought to the 

table, which brought about competition and some healthy 

tension,” Elander noted. “It doesn’t hurt 

the creative process, it helped moved the 

project forward, and was much better for 

things overall.” 

Now that the CRADA has ended, the shining success for both NREL and DuPont is 

that the research is making its way from 

the lab to the commercial world. DuPont 

is taking what was learned during the 

CRADA and is looking to commercialize 

the technology. Through a recently formed 

joint venture (Dupont Danisco Cellulosic 

Ethanol, LLC) with enzyme technology 

provider Genencor, DuPont and its industrial partner are building a dedicated pilot-scale biorefinery in 

Tennessee that is utilizing technology and processes initially 

developed within the NREL-DuPont CRADA.

— Heather Lammers (March 6, 2009)

“DuPont had a wealth of 

scientific and engineering 

knowledge they brought to

the table, which brought about 

competition and some healthy 

tension.” – Richard Elander
BIOMASS

15

ALGAE-TO-FUEL RESEARCH

ENJOYS RESURGENCE AT NREL

NREL maintains a repository of hundreds of strains of algae that could 

be used to make biofuels. The strains must be grown and maintained 

under strict temperature and light conditions. Credit: Pat Corkery/PIX 15583

P

assenger jets cruise at 35,000 feet without a hiccup.

Catfish farmers lease ponds to biofuels entrepreneurs.

Venture capitalists sink $1 billion into green crude.

Judging by the headlines, can it be long before we’re filling

our tanks with clean fuel from algae?

At NREL, researchers are accelerating efforts to identify and 

characterize the most promising strains of algae for fuel production. The work has resumed more than a decade after its 

original algae fuels program was curtailed because the fuels 

were considered too costly to compete with petroleum.

Today, algae fuels still are not close to being economically

competitive with petroleum, according to NREL scientists.

So what’s changed? 

Record high crude oil prices, instability in the Middle East and 

other oil exporting regions and global warming concerns connected to increasing levels of carbon dioxide have made algae 

an appealing potential fuel source—again. 

Interest at an All-Time High

And public interest is soaring after recent well-publicized algae 

fuel demonstrations, including airliner test flights using blends 

with conventional jet fuel—most recently in Houston by Continental Airlines. Some airlines and engine manufacturers hope 

to be using algae blends within a few years.

“I’m getting calls every day from people who want to get into 

algae fuels,” said Al Darzins, a group manager and principal 

researcher in NREL’s National Bioenergy Center. “There are 

hundreds of companies looking into it now here, in Europe, 

and the Middle East.”

So is pond scum ready to replace nearly 100 million gallons of 

petroleum diesel and jet fuel burned every year?

Not remotely, Darzins says. Biological questions about the 

organisms and engineering questions related to fuel production, distribution and quality standards must be answered for 

algae fuels to be competitive with oil currently priced at less 

than $50 per barrel.

“All we’ve really seen are tests involving one engine of a jet 

running on a blend using a small percentage of algal fuel—and 

there were no passengers, of course,” Darzins said. “In my 

book, that’s a long way from commercialization.”

Potential is Enormous

That doesn’t mean the prospect isn’t tantalizing. Algae are like 

microscopic factories using photosynthesis to transform carbon 

dioxide and sunlight into lipids, or oil. Some strains can double 

their weight in a few hours under the right conditions. 

Algae can grow in fresh, salty, or even contaminated water, can 

generate 30 times more oil per acre than plants used for biodiesel and other biofuels, and algae don’t compete with food crops.

Scientists think algae might grow fatter and faster if they were 

force-fed extra carbon dioxide, which could help alleviate 

the buildup of greenhouse gases. Smokestack emissions from 

power plants and other sources could be diverted directly into 

the ponds, feeding the algae while keeping greenhouse gases 

out of the atmosphere. 

From 1978 to 1996, the laboratory was a pioneer in the field 

with the Aquatic Species Program. Researchers screened and 

characterized more than 3,000 potential strains, shed light on 

the growth conditions that stimulate lipid production, demonstrated open ponds for mass production of biomass, and made 

significant breakthroughs in genetic engineering. 

Back to the Basics

Today, NREL has resumed that work, while putting a greater 

emphasis on understanding their basic biology. When these 

microalgae are starved of the nutrients they need, their lipid 

content can increase as much as 60%.

NREL and Chevron Corporation are working under a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) in 

which NREL is boosting microalgae’s productivity. Chevron 

anticipates using the resulting oil as a feedstock for renewable 

transportation fuels.

But not every strain contains all the qualities required to produce algae fuel—growing fast, growing fat, and tolerating a 

wide variety of conditions.

And, different strains have evolved under different conditions 

in different locales. It’s unlikely, Darzins says, that one strain 

would be used nationwide because of regional differences in 

climate and water.

“We’ve only begun to scratch the surface,” Darzins said. “We 

need to understand the lipid pathways and what regulates their 

lipid production and growth.”

Currently NREL’s algae experiments are limited to 1-liter flasks 

under fluorescent light. When renovations to the greenhouse at 

the Field Test Laboratory Building are completed, algae strains 

can be tested in 75 gallon batches under natural light conditions, 

which can be 10 times more intensive than artificial lighting.

“Some strains that look good now may not maximize photosynthesis when we scale up or expose them to natural light,” 

Darzins said.

Within a few years, Darzins hopes to complete construction

of new outdoor ponds behind the FTLB that will test algae 

strains, production systems and harvesting methods at scales 

up to 100 acres.

— Joseph B. Verrengia (April 3, 2009)
16

BIOFUELS STUDIES TO BENEFIT 

FROM BETTER LAB TEST

NREL Research Fellow Michael Seibert holds a

manganese sample. Knowing the exact manganese

content in photosynthetic membranes could help

scientist better understand how plants split water.

Credit: Pat Corkery/PIX 16414

T

hank sunlight, algae, and green plants for the air we 

breathe, the food we eat and, in the not-too-distant

future, the fuels that power our trips by plane, rail

and automobile.

In a process that is as complex as it is 

elegant, as breathtaking as it is breath-making, sunlight excites electrons in plant cells 

setting off a chain reaction that rips apart 

water to release oxygen and then changes 

carbon dioxide to sugars to produce fuel. 

Now, a couple of scientists at the National 

Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) have 

found a simpler, faster, and far less costly 

way to measure manganese—the metal that 

helps plants split water. It’s a breakthrough 

that could support the development of photosynthetic systems for producing biofuels.

The finding is likely to make a loud noise in alternative energy 

because the efficiency of biofuels production depends on the 

efficiency of photosynthesis.

New Tool Makes Lab Work Easier

“This is going to make a difficult analysis much more routine,” 

NREL Research Fellow Dr. Michael Seibert said of the new 

process that quantifies the manganese content in plants that 

split water to get electrons for biofuels.

Up to now it has taken a half day and equipment worth as 

much as $200,000 to measure manganese in the water-splitting 

process of photosynthesis. 

The NREL process takes a half hour and uses equipment that 

costs less than $10,000. And that opens up the process to any 

professional or undergraduate lab in the world.

“It’s a new tool that makes life in the lab easier,” Seibert said. 

“It could help our lab and others make a lot more progress in 

understanding photosynthesis ... and ultimately developing 

artificial photosynthetic systems.”

Striving to Understand Nature Better

A paper on the study, co-authored by Seibert and his Russian 

colleague Boris Semin was just published in the journal Photosynthesis Research.

Seibert has a doctorate in molecular biology and biophysics 

from the University of Pennsylvania. He worked at General 

Telephone Laboratories for six years before joining the Solar 

Energy Research Institute, the precursor to NREL, in 1977. 

Semin, a professor at Moscow State University in Russia, has 

spent four months each fall for the past decade at NREL working with Seibert.

Plants and algae convert the energy of sunlight into fuel, a 

process that has served them well for eons, and, by the way, 

has kept animals and humans alive by converting water to 

oxygen. But humans must better understand and improve on 

that natural process to gain the maximum benefit of biofuels.

Seibert and Semin used spinach when they quantified the 

manganese ions in the water-splitting process, but the assay 

could be used for algae or any other organism that does planttype photosynthesis. The procedure 

counts the number of manganese ions 

per photosynthetic electron transport 

chain, the natural process that starts 

with sunlight and fixes carbon, or 

releases hydrogen, and oxygen.

Making the Complex Simple

The counting of manganese has been 

done before, but only via complex 

assays using Atomic Absorption 

spectroscopy or Electron Paramagnetic 

Resonance spectroscopy, processes 

that take several hours and require 

extremely expensive equipment.

Manganese ions can be depleted when 

plants are exposed to heat, excess salt, heavy metals, radiation, 

light, pH extremes, and other stresses. That’s why it’s often 

“It could help our lab and 

others make a lot more 

progress in understanding 

photosynthesis ... and 

ultimately developing 

artificial photosynthetic 

systems.” – Michael Seibert
BIOMASS

17

crucial to know the exact manganese content in photosynthetic 

membranes.

Seibert and Semin used a laboratory-grade, visible light 

spectrometer and very small amounts of spinach membranes. 

Their workspace was a countertop.

First, they purified the samples. All green plants contain 

small amounts of manganese that bind on the surface of the 

membranes but that don’t have a specific function in photosynthesis. If those manganese were included in the count, the 

information would be useless. So, they used calcium chloride 

to purify the samples.

Next, they used hydrochloric acid 

to extract the functional manganese 

from the membranes.

Now they had the manganese, but 

they also had contaminating membrane particles that could absorb or 

scatter light and affect the accuracy of 

the assay. To spin away the impurities, they used a small counter-top 

centrifuge, spinning for several minutes at 12,000 revolutions per minute.

So, they had purified manganese but 

no easy way to quantify it.

A Day in the Library

The final “Aha!” came when Semin and Seibert realized that 

they could use a dye to determine the precise number of manganese ions used when plants split water and make oxygen.

“The Eureka moment was learning that the dye was specific 

for only manganese,” Seibert said.

How Did He and Semin Find That Out?

They went to the library, and found that someone a decade 

ago had used the dye 3,3,5,5 tetramethylbenzadrine to determine the manganese content of salt water. “Sometimes a day 

in the library can save months in the laboratory,” Seibert said. 

“From there it was a development process to clean up the 

sample material so that we could use the dye” to fingerprint 

the manganese. The dye binds to the manganese in the solution and changes color in proportion to the amount of manganese present.

When they applied the dye, sure 

enough, it revealed that there were four 

manganese ions per electron transport 

chain, just as had the far more expensive spectroscopy processes. “If we can 

easily characterize how much manganese there is in the natural system, we 

can start replacing the natural manganese with other metals such as iron to 

learn how the system works biochemically,” Seibert said.

That in turn could lead to information 

useful for artificial systems to split 

water and make, say, hydrogen fuel 

without having to use an electrolysis 

system.

That’s in the future. But perfecting the understanding of the 

water-splitting process of photosynthesis—in a structure 

called Photosystem II—is a key step in providing renewable, 

non-polluting fuels that can power the future of transportation 

without contributing to global warming.

— Bill Scanlon (July 2, 2009) 

“Sometimes a day in the 

library can save months in the 

laboratory. From there it was a 

development process to clean up 

the sample material so that we 

could use the dye.” – Michael Seibert
18

NREL BREAKS DOWN WALLS

FOR BIOFUELS

NREL Senior Scientist Michael Crowley created an animated model 

of Cel7A, nature’s primary enzyme for decaying plants. It’s computer 

aided modeling similar to this that is helping NREL researchers look 

for faster ways to make cellulosic ethanol. Credit: Pat Corkery/PIX 15957

R

esearchers at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory 

(NREL) and ethanol producers are racing to come up with 

ways to make ethanol from cellulosic biomass that are 

cheaper and easier to produce than current methods. But they 

are hitting a wall. Cell walls in plants are making the production of cellulosic ethanol a challenge. So researchers are creating 

their own computer program to help model and break down 

the tiny fibers of cellulose—or fibrils—found in plant cells. 

Although ethanol is becoming more available to consumers, 

NREL is working closely with the U.S. Department of Energy 

(DOE) to meet a quickly approaching goal to produce competitively priced ethanol for $1.50 per gallon by 2012. Why the rush? 

DOE believes this is the price at which ethanol will be able to 

go head-to-head with gasoline while the United States strives to 

reduce our dependence on oil. In addition, the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 requires that the United States use 

15 billion gallons of renewable fuels by 2012. All of this means 

the United States needs to find ways to make more ethanol and 

fast. To help accomplish this goal, NREL researchers are looking 

at how to make cellulosic ethanol a cheaper, quicker reality.

“To reduce the cost of cellulosic ethanol we must understand 

how to break down the plant cells into the sugars needed to 

make ethanol,” NREL researcher Antti-Pekka Hynninen said. 

“The cellulose fibrils of these plants are very long so we use 

computer modeling to see how we can break them apart.”

Plants are Naturally Tough

Currently, there are no ethanol plants in the United States that 

distill ethanol using the non-edible parts of plants such as corn 

stalks, grasses, or wood chips. All commercially available ethanol is made the “easy” way using starchy products such as corn 

kernels because starches are much easier to break down and convert into the sugars needed to make ethanol. Cellulosic biomass 

contains sugars that are much harder to get because the plants 

combine the sugars into cellulose fibers and use these tougher 

fibers as structure to hold up the plant and protect the cells from 

outside attack—and in the case of woody biomass, it’s the very 

cell structure that leads to the slow deterioration of wood. 

“Cellulose is grouped in bundles and gives the plant cell walls 

their strength,” Principle Scientist Mark Nimlos said. “We need 

to learn more about how they are grouped and attached to the 

plant cell walls so we can take it apart to make more ethanol 

that’s cheaper and requires less energy to produce.” 

NREL researchers typically study cellulose fibrils that are 500 to 

1,000 glucose units long and figure out with easiest way to bust 

them apart. However, these fibrils are too large to study using 

current computer models. 

“Right now the technique is to consider each atom in each fiber, 

which is not practical using existing computers,” Nimlos said. 

“We need to group atoms into beads, or larger grains.”

New Approach for Computer Modeling

NREL hired Hynninen in early 2009. He has a Ph.D. in physics 

from Utrecht University in the Netherlands. Hynninen hopes 

to overcome the problem presented by such large molecules by 

building a simpler “coarse-grained” computer model of cellulose 

fibrils. In the new approach, multiple atoms (typically 3 to 7) are 

grouped into a single spherical bead. The coarse-grained model 

is then built up from these beads. The new model is expected to 

allow computer simulations that are 10 to 100 times faster.

“The big question that we will need to answer is how to define 

the forces between the beads,” Hynninen said. “Those forces 

must be equal to the forces acting in the atomistic model. At the 

moment, our work is centered on building the software tools 

that map those atomistic forces onto the coarse-grained model.”

“The key here is how to get rid of the details and keep the 

overall picture,” Senior Scientist Mike Crowley said. “We can’t 

model every detail of every atom. Think of modeling the collision of two cars. When studying the force of the collision, you 

don’t examine the pistons in the engine, you look at just the 

vehicle even though it’s made of many parts. We need to look 

at larger segments to model the cell overall. Sounds simple, but 

it’s very tricky.” 

The idea of something being “tricky” is motivation for Hynninen and makes him a valued member of the NREL team. 

“Antti-Pekka’s programming expertise means he sits down and 

writes a program needed without being restricted by existing software,” Crowley said. “He’s a maestro who can make a 

computer do what he needs it to do.”

Hynninen’s view of his work is more mathematical. “My goal is 

simply solving a problem that has some impact on our lives and 

makes a difference,” he said. “This is a nice example of applied 

science working on real problems and goals we need to meet.”

Next steps for the program officially titled “Meso-Scale Computational Modeling of Polysaccharides in Plant Cell Walls” are 

to validate the model and publish the work done at NREL so 

this type of modeling can be used in other areas.

“I believe this same method could be used for other systems 

and they don’t have to be cellulosic or proteins—there’s a 

potential for many uses.” Hynninen said.

— Heather Lammers (November 30, 2009)
BUILDINGS 

19

NREL HELPS NEW ORLEANS

GO GREEN

Small, energy-efficient two-story homes such as this one under 

construction in New Orleans are the result of a partnership

among DOE’s Building America program and local foundations. 

NREL is providing energy efficiency advice for the homes’ design.

Credit: Phil Voss/PIX 16863

New Orleans is going green as it continues rebuilding 

after Hurricane Katrina—with a big assist from the U.S. 

Department of Energy’s (DOE) National Renewable 

Energy Laboratory (NREL).

Sprouting in once-flooded neighborhoods are some new 

energy-efficient homes featuring rooftop solar panels, extensive insulation, and more efficient climate systems. These standards will be applied citywide in schools and hospitals, too.

Many of the improvements are based on 

renewable energy programs and strategies 

provided by DOE and the laboratory.

Nor are the energy-saving improvements 

limited to hurricane reconstruction. Even 

before Katrina, many of the city’s commercial buildings and dwellings were blighted. 

Entire neighborhoods were built decades 

ago without insulation and are subject to 

termite infestations. 

The lab’s commitment to demonstration 

projects and community partnerships has 

encouraged city officials to embrace renewable energy.

Now the motto “Cleaner...Smarter” is stenciled on the city’s 

new buses that run on a 5% biodiesel blend, and New Orleans 

has been selected as one of DOE’s Solar America Cities.

“New Orleans has an amazingly vibrant local culture,” says 

senior project leader Phil Voss, who returned to Golden in 

January after 18 months in New Orleans. He is the lab’s first 

energy expert to be embedded in a field project. 

“And until now, that same culture has not been open to many 

outside ideas, like energy efficiency.” 

A Huge Challenge

Hurricane Katrina was the single largest natural catastrophe in 

U.S. history.

The storm hit on Aug. 29, 2005. More than 1 million people 

were evacuated from the Gulf Coast; 2,541 were killed or 

remain missing. 

Katrina flooded 80% of New Orleans, causing $89.6 billion in 

damages. Half of the city’s homes were under at least four feet 

of water. Three weeks later, the storm surge from Hurricane 

Rita flooded the city again.

During the city’s extended recovery, Steve Chalk, DOE 

Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for the Office of Energy 

Efficiency and Renewable Energy, and Mary Werner, NREL’s 

Integrated Deployment Manager, established an office in 

New Orleans to promote energy conservation in the city’s 

rebuilding plans and introduce the use of renewable energy 

technology.

In addition to assigning Voss, NREL added local staff that 

included rehiring one of its former employees, Joe Ryan, a 

New Orleans resident. The NREL/DOE team has advised two 

dozen organizations focused on recovery and rebuilding. 

Housing for Hundreds of Thousands

DOE has challenged the homebuilding industry to build thousands of new high-performance homes in New Orleans by 

2012 under the department’s Building America program.

The first homes to be certified as meeting the DOE Builder’s 

Challenge criteria are being built in the Gentilly neighborhood by a philanthropic effort named “Project Home Again” 

with Green Coast Enterprises and 

the Leonard and Louise Riggio 

Foundation. 

Four high-performance homes 

have been completed, and 16 

more will be ready by spring. 

Eventually the project could 

expand to 100 homes or more. 

They are reserved for qualifying 

lower-income Gentilly homeowers whose previous homes were 

destroyed. 

“If that doesn’t sound like 

progress,” Voss said, “you don’t know the challenges in 

New Orleans. When it comes to rebuilding, the Big Easy is 

anything but.”

“New Orleans has an amazingly 

vibrant local culture. And until 

now, that same culture has not 

been open to many outside ideas, 

like energy efficiency.” – Phil Voss
20

The two to four bedroom houses are designed to reduce 

energy use by 30–40% and lower utility bills by as much as 

$1,000 per year. Key features include:

•	 Passive heating and cooling features such as cross-ventilation and screened-in porches

•	 Daylighting with highly efficient “low-E” double-hung, 

double-glazed windows

•	 Whole-house insulation using high-density spray foam

•	 Properly sized, efficient heat pumps paired with 

dehumidifiers

•	 Air-handlers and ductwork within conditioned space

•	 Energy Star® appliances and lighting

•	 Foundation piers to elevate the houses above the flood 

plain.

By eliminating drafts and removing moisture from the indoor 

air, residents won’t have to overchill their homes to be comfortable, even when summer weather hits 95°F with an equal 

dose of humidity.

NREL and Building America partner Florida Solar Energy 

Center are improving affordable home designs with the most 

active homebuilder in the New Orleans Area: Habitat for 

Humanity. Habitat has built two demonstration houses sideby-side in the Musicians Village district. The organization is 

expanding its building program in New Orleans by a factor of 

10 over pre-Katrina levels.

Catholic Charities is working with Building America and its 

partner Building Science Corp. on another affordable energyefficient design. NREL is performing long-term monitoring 

and analysis of the home’s heat pump with enhanced dehumidification capability.

New Orleans is one of the DOE’s 25 Solar America Cities.

Credit: Phil Voss/PIX 16862

Energy-Efficient Schools

NREL and DOE also formed a partnership with the Orleans 

Parish school district to use the Integrated Design approach to 

building high performance schools. 

Of the district’s 128 schools open before Katrina, only 84 are 

expected to be open over the next 10 years. Many of these 

facilities must be replaced or substantially renovated. Taking 

into account the decades of deferred maintenance as well as 

storm damage, the reconstruction price tag for schools alone 

will approach $2 billion.

So far, four new schools are under construction. With help 

from NREL’s Buildings Group, they will be 25–35% more 

energy efficient than code by including new construction 

methods, energy efficient systems, and energy management 

tools.

That energy efficiency standard has been incorporated in the 

school district’s 10-year master plan. The lab and DOE are 

completing energy audits of existing schools, too.

In a separate project, NREL’s Paul Torcellini and Shanti Pless 

are consulting on the design of a shared $2 billion hospital 

complex with Louisiana State University and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.

Energy Policy Development

The NREL team also helped the city council develop a comprehensive energy policy and a plan to generate community 

support.

The “Energy Smart New Orleans Plan” includes financing for 

energy efficiency improvements in homes and small businesses, low-income weatherization, a pilot solar thermal and 

PV component, and a contractor training and certification 

program. 

The state government also offering a 50% residential tax credit 

on the first $25,000 of the cost of an installed rooftop photovoltaic system.

NREL is engaging local utilities, public officials, and central 

business district leaders on integrating power generated by 

distributed PV systems into the local electricity grid.

— Joseph B. Verrengia (Feb. 27, 2009)
BUILDINGS 

21

TWO YEARS LATER, GREENSBURG

IS OFFICIALLY GREEN—WITH

NREL’S HELP

A tornado on May 4, 2007 destroyed 90% of Greensburg, Kansas. 

With NREL’s help, the city is rebuilding to stringent energy

efficiency standards and adding renewable energy sources in

an effort to be the nation’s greenest community. PIX 16290

T

he same natural force that annihilated Greensburg, Kansas, 

in 2007 soon will be illuminating the town that has been 

rebuilt into America’s most energy-conscious community.

With technical assistance from NREL, the city of Greensburg, 

John Deere Renewable Energy and other partners will open a 

wind farm generating 12.5 MW of electricity, enough to power 

4,000 homes. Replacing fossil-fired electricity with a renewable source is a significant step in the town’s well-documented 

recovery—not only for the environmental benefits, but as an 

economic development strategy, too.

Traumatized residents could be forgiven for doubting any 

promise delivered on the wind. But now, says NREL project 

Leader Lynn Billman, townspeople proudly wear T-shirts that 

quip “Greensburg, KS—It’s a Wind-Wind Situation.”

When Catastrophe Brings Opportunity

On May 4, 2007, an evening tornado cranking at 205 mph 

leveled the town, killing 11 people and uprooting its 1,400 residents. The giant twister destroyed 90% of the buildings in its 

unusually wide path, including Main Street, schools, government offices, the fire station, the bank, and the hospital. 

Within a few days, advisers from NREL, the U.S. Department 

of Energy, and other agencies were huddling with local officials 

and residents under the big white emergency services tent to 

help answer the Big Question—what will become of Greensburg? Since then, Billman has coordinated NREL experts and 

subcontractors who have served as technical advisors on every 

aspect of renewable energy and sustainable reconstruction.

Already, Greensburg’s decision to set a new green standard 

is paying off. Tests on 100 new homes built since the disaster 

show energy efficiency has improved by an average of 40% over 

homes built to conventional building codes. Some residents saw 

their winter heating bills reduced by as much as two-thirds.

On May 2, 2009, Greensburg recognized the NREL with the 

city’s first annual Outstanding Support Award for playing an 

“instrumental” role in the town’s recovery. NREL advisers 

will work in Greensburg for another year to complete on-theground projects and develop a sustainability blueprint that 

other cities and towns might follow. 

“NREL has made our lives easier and better,” said City Administrator Steve Hewitt. “Our experience will benefit many other 

communities that NREL will be working with.”

Community-Sized Wind Power

The Greensburg wind farm will include 10 turbines, each rated 

at 1.25 MW. John Deere Renewable Energy will build and 

maintain the wind farm, and it will sell power to the Kansas 

Power Pool, a cooperative of several Kansas cities. Greensburg 

expects to consume about a quarter of the electricity the wind 

farm generates.

When the wind isn’t blowing and the turbines cannot generate 

electricity, the Kansas Power Pool will provide the town with 

clean power from other sources, including hydropower, to meet 

the community’s goal of being powered entirely by renewable 

sources.

Groundbreaking for the Greensburg wind farm is planned for 

this summer at a site three miles outside of town. Commercial 

operation is expected to begin in 2010.

Laboratory advisers recommended wind power to Greensburg 

early in the rebuilding effort; Kansas has the third highest 

potential among the U.S. states to generate electricity from 

wind, according to a NREL analysis. 

And, they realized that Greensburg could be a showcase for 

distributed community-scale wind power. 

NREL developed extensive wind farm technical studies and 

business models as part of its broader green recovery plan but, 

the city decided to contract the wind farm’s development with 

John Deere Renewable Energy.

Billman said the laboratory wants Greensburg to have a wind 

system generating clean electricity economically and at a location visible from town, and the John Deere Renewable Energy 

plan achieves those goals.

“We fully support the city’s decision,” Billman said. “It will 

help Greensburg achieve its vision without raising the cost of 

electricity for its residents.”

Part of a Broader Clean Energy Plan

Other areas that NREL advisers have been working on to keep 

Greensburg operating sustainably on its own for decades include:

•	 Municipal building design and construction to LEED-platinum standards, making it the first city in the nation to do so

•	 LED streetlights 

•	 Energy-efficient framing, insulation, ductwork and other 

improvements to new residential and commercial construction

•	 Helping establish a local wind turbine distributorship at the 

John Deere farm equipment dealership

•	 Assessing biomass-fueled heating opportunities.

— Joseph B. Verrengia (May 8, 2009)
22

NREL, INDUSTRY WORK TO

HALVE BUILDING ENERGY USE

The BigHorn Home Improvement Center, a retail complex in

Silverthorne, Colorado, is an example of a retailer using natural 

daylighting to reduce energy use. Credit: Jim Yost/PIX 09218

Walk into your favorite retail or office building, and 

something’s at work all around you that you probably take for granted—energy. Energy to run lightsfor 

displays, energy to cool the building on a hot summer day, 

energy to keep your favorite ice cream nice and cold.

Partners from the private sector, the 

U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), 

and two national labs, NREL and 

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), are working together 

to reduce energy consumption in 

commercial buildings in the United 

States. NREL launched a Web site 

dedicated to the collaborative 

research project dubbed “National 

Accounts.” 

NREL and PNNL are currently 

working with 23 National Accounts 

Companies (NACs), including nine retailers, 13 real estate 

management companies, and one distribution facility. 

Through the program, the team will create, test, and validate 

design concepts that will move the industry towards net-zero 

energy commercial buildings.

Aiming Toward Zero-Energy Buildings

National Accounts is part of DOE’s Net-Zero Energy Commercial Building Initiative (CBI), which was mandated by the 2007 

Energy Independence and Security Act (EISA). EISA enabled 

DOE to bring together parties from the private sector, DOE 

national labs, other federal agencies, and nongovernmental 

organizations to advance research into low- and zero-netenergy buildings. CBI’s goal is to develop market-ready, net 

zero-energy commercial buildings by 2025. A net zero-energy 

building makes as much energy as it uses over a year. 

The CBI program is currently funded as a public/private cost 

share. DOE is contributing $15 million through the technical 

expertise of NREL and PNNL. Companies kick in 20% of the 

project value. Construction costs and capital improvement fees 

to retrofit older buildings are not included in the program. 

Currently, retail and office buildings consume 18% of the 

nation’s total energy and half of nation’s overall building 

energy (including homes, schools, and other structures). The 

program partners will work to build new facilities that use 50% 

less energy and retrofit older buildings to use 30% less energy. 

“This program is unique because it involves the energy 

end-users,” explained NREL Senior Engineer Paul Torcellini. 

“Using a flipped model, we are engaging energy consumers 

from a business point of view.”

The business motivation for industry participants is often 

related to their bottom lines. “Some retailers’ margins are so 

small, they can actually make money by saving money with 

energy efficiency,” Torcellini said.

Your Very Own Technical Adviser

As partners in the program, NREL provides technical and 

research support to the NACs. “When they come up with 

questions,” said Torcellini, “We do the analysis and say, ‘this

is what you should do to get the maximum value.’” 

Issues like daylighting, refrigeration, and replacing conventional parking lot lights with LEDs are some of the energy 

design measures the teams are beginning to tackle. 

“Another area we are evaluating is outside air,” added Torcellini. “How much 

ventilation do you really need for retail 

space? If we are over-ventilating, then 

we have extra air to heat and cool.”

Having NREL staffers serve as technical 

advisers is a great perk for the companies participating in program. In addition, each NAC receives state-of-the-art 

assistance from NREL that may include:

• State-of-the-art energy modeling 

•	 Integrated design processes that incorporate energy

efficiency and renewable energy technologies 

•	 Guidance to help procure materials and equipment 

“Another area we are evaluating 

is outside air. How much 

ventilation do you really need 

for retail space? If we are overventilating, then we have extra 

air to heat and cool.” – Paul Torcellini
BUILDINGS 

23

•	 Low-energy building designs that can be replicated across 

company portfolios 

•	 Detailed documentation, including business case studies 

with information about both process and results

•	 Research quality results

•	 Recognition as leaders in their industry.

The state-of-the-art energy modeling saves building owners 

time and effort as they develop low-energy buildings. “The 

modeling allows everyone involved in the project to run 

through ‘what-if’ scenarios relatively inexpensively and it’s 

one of the services the teams get from NREL as part of the 

cost-share.” Torcellini said.

NREL also wants to provide data and tools for anyone interested in using these strategies to build or renovate low-energy 

buildings.

“We are also helping make the business case for incorporating 

these technologies,” Torcellini said. “We’ll be preparing case 

studies and research reports, and we’ll be measuring actual 

performance against energy goals. And, we’ll work with NAC 

members to share non-proprietary research with members of 

their industry.”

Web Site to Share Progress Reports

NREL’s National Accounts Web site helps “make the case” for 

more energy efficient buildings. Some NACs will be posting information about their work with National Accounts, 

including lessons learned, what’s working, and the challenges 

they’ve encountered as their new construction and/or renovation project progress. They will also share non-proprietary 

details about how they achieved energy efficiency targets.

“What’s exciting about the fruits of this program is that the 

participating companies will continue to benefit from reduced 

energy costs long after the construction or retrofitting is 

complete,” Torcellini said. “They’ll also have been involved 

in a program that will help the commercial building industry 

develop new best practices for low-energy design.”

NREL Senior Engineer Paul Torcellini examines an energy management system, which helps optimize the operation of the mechanical 

and lighting systems in a retail store. The system controls the heating systems, ceiling fans, and lighting levels. Credit: Jim Yost/PIX 09214 

National Account Companies 

•	 Bank of America

•	 Best Buy

•	 CB Richard Ellis

•	 Forest City Enterprises

•	 Hilton Hotels Corporation

•	 Hines

•	 InterContinental

Hotels Group

•	 JCPenney

•	 John Deere

•	 Kohl’s

•	 Macy’s

•	 The Opus Group

•	 PNC Financial Services

•	 ProLogis

•	 Regency Centers

•	 Ryan Companies U.S.

•	 Simon Property Group

•	 SUPERVALU

•	 Target

•	 Tishman Speyer

•	 Toyota

•	 The Westfield Group

•	 Whole Foods Market

— Heather Lammers (June 19, 2009)
24

SOFTWARE HELPS DESIGN ENERGY 

STINGY BUILDINGS

OpenStudio, a new quick, easy to use and free software tool

created by NREL developers seamlessly combines the building 

energy simulation of EnergyPlus with the popular drawing

interface of Google’s SketchUp.

G

one is the tedious and time-consuming task of manually 

entering building geometry data. Now users can quickly 

sketch a computerized 3-D drawing of a building and run 

a fast simulation during the early design phase to determine if 

their design is energy efficient. Taking a virtual X-ray of a building’s energy use in the conceptual phase helps architects design 

a structure with fewer carbon emissions, lower utility bills and a 

healthier environment. 

OpenStudio Simulates Energy Usage in Early Design Phase

The OpenStudio plug-in is bridging the gap between energy 

modeling and the building design process. Nick Long, a NREL 

engineer who helped develop OpenStudio, says the software is 

a critical piece to getting energy simulation into the early design 

phase of building construction. 

“Integrating energy analysis into that phase is very important 

because you can start to reduce energy use well before a building is even in conceptual design,” he said.

Because of the simplicity of OpenStudio and the quickness of the 

SketchUp models, architects can easily use this tool during the 

launch of a building project. “Our hope is that by using OpenStudio in design charrettes, users can start throwing away designs at 

the very beginning of a project, saying: ‘This is not a good design 

because we’re going to use too much energy,’” Long said.

Users Download OpenStudio for Free

Around the globe, architects and engineers are embracing OpenStudio, which was launched in April 2008. Users can download 

the software for free and see how easy it is to improve a building’s energy consumption in a fraction of the time of moreexpensive computer-aided design (CAD) packages. 

Approximately 700 copies of OpenStudio are downloaded each 

month. “It’s been great,” Long said. “Thousands of users of 

EnergyPlus are learning about OpenStudio and adopting it as 

the defacto geometry editor.”

Developed by the Department of Energy in 2001, EnergyPlus is 

a stand-alone simulation program that models whole-building 

energy consumption from heating, cooling, ventilation, lighting, 

water systems, and other energy flows. Long explains that the primary value of OpenStudio is to provide a graphical user interface 

to develop geometry that can be used directly with EnergyPlus. If 

a user already has an EnergyPlus input file, he can use OpenStudio to render and change the geometry without losing any of the 

other information already contained in the EnergyPlus file.

“Architects won’t go into a text file to edit geometry, changing 

vertex by vertex,” he said. “They want something graphical, 

and SketchUp is a quick method to render a building.” In little 

time, a designer can create a building’s geometry from scratch in 

SketchUp: add zones, draw heat transfer surfaces, draw windows 

and doors, etc., and then run an energy simulation in EnergyPlus.

OpenStudio offers many practical applications that give users 

the freedom to explore different design options, such as performing overhang analyses. When a building design has a lot 

of windows on the south side, the designer needs to know how 

big and how deep to make the overhangs.

“With OpenStudio you use the capabilities of SketchUp that will 

show the sun’s path and cast shadows on the windows—at any 

time of the day for an entire year,” Long says. “Then you can 

play a video and watch the sun move over the building for a 

year to figure out if you have effectively shaded your windows 

and also validate it using EnergyPlus.” 

Plug-in Designed as an Open Source Program

Peter Ellis, principal developer of OpenStudio, took 18 months 

to write the complex program. He used open-source coding 

principles so that any developer has the flexibility to modify or 

enhance the software.

Christopher Cronin, Google’s Strategist for SketchUp, says, “OpenStudio is lauded around our office as one of the most complicated 

plug-ins ever written for SketchUp.” And Sang Ahn from Google 

adds that OpenStudio is the most impressive extension he has seen. 

NREL developers are working to make OpenStudio faster and 

add functionality. “We’re hoping to provide OpenStudio as a 

full graphical interface to EnergyPlus that allows users to edit 

HVAC, plug loads, and lighting loads, and the remaining building inputs at the same time,” Long said. 

Future enhancements for OpenStudio might include:

•	 Integrating with a daylighting program

•	 Linking to a construction-cost database

•	 Connecting to the U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership 

in Energy and Environmental Design.

Reducing energy use is an important factor in improving the 

sustainability of residential and commercial buildings. OpenStudio makes energy modeling software easier to use and more 

accessible and affordable in the early design phase. This enables 

architects to evaluate energy-saving strategies when design 

changes are least costly.

The OpenStudio plug-in is bridging the gap between energy 

modeling and the building design process, says Nick Long, a 

NREL engineer who helps develop the software.

— Mary Darr (Oct. 9, 2009)
CONCENTRATING SOLAR POWER 

25

NEW SOLAR TECHNOLOGY 

CONCENTRATES ON COST, EFFICIENCY

NREL senior engineer Keith Gawlik and University of Colorado 

graduate student Kathleen Stynes are conducting tests on the

new SkyTrough parabolic trough design atop South Table

Mountain for the next several months. Gawlik is holding a

sample of the trough’s highly reflective metal skin. The sheet

metal replaces heavy glass mirrors. Credit: Pat Corkery/PIX 16139

I

t looks like a giant funhouse mirror. But the big new dish

atop South Table Mountain could be a renewable energy 

breakthrough that helps make concentrated solar power

more affordable and appealing to utilities and their customers.

For the next several months, NREL engineers will be testing

the performance of SkyTrough, an innovative parabolic

trough that is coated with a gleaming reflective skin instead

of mirrored glass.

NREL offers leading-edge testing and performance analysis 

for advanced solar technologies and other renewable energy 

designs. 

The SkyTrough was developed by SkyFuel, an Albuquerquebased manufacturer with a research facility near NREL in 

Arvada, Colorado.

The unit’s lightweight glass-free are mirrors made of sheet

metal beneath ReflecTech® mirror film. 

This highly-reflective, silver-metalized film is lighter and less 

expensive than the breakable glass mirrors that are traditionally 

used. The film is a joint invention of NREL and ReflecTechTM 

and exclusively licensed from NREL. The glossy laminate is 

comprised of multiple layers of polymer films with an inner 

layer of pure silver to provide for a highly reflective surface that 

also protects the silver layer from oxidation 

In commercial use, a SkyTrough could measure as large as 

375 feet long and 20 feet high. One SkyTrough would supply 

enough electricity for 125 homes. The test model is smaller, but 

uses the same technologies.

“It’s unlike any parabolic trough design used so far,” said NREL 

senior engineer Keith Gawlik. “Our new facility is designed 

to test the optical efficiency of the unit, which they can’t do on 

their own at SkyFuel.”

How Parabolic-Trough Systems Work

Parabolic-trough systems concentrate the sun’s energy through 

long U-shaped mirrors. The mirrors are tilted toward the sun, 

focusing sunlight on a vacuum pipe that runs down the center 

of the trough. 

The tube contains heat-transfer oil that absorbs the focused 

sunlight and reaches temperatures of 400°C. The hot oil then is 

used to boil water in a conventional steam generator to produce 

electricity. 

As the sun moves across the horizon, the troughs follow its 

trajectory by rotating along their axes with the help of tracking 

motors. This keeps the collectors oriented towards the sun to 

maximize the system’s performance throughout the day.

SkyTrough Testing at NREL

The SkyTrough itself is mounted on NREL’s Large Payload Solar 

Tracker. It supports solar components that require 2-axis tracking. The tracker is capable of carrying a maximum vertical load 

of 9,000 pounds with a tracking accuracy of 1 milliradian.

The NREL tests will center on validating the SkyTrough’s optical performance. A key step in concentrating solar power (CSP) 

is making sure the light collected in the parabolic trough is 

accurately converted and focused on the receiver tube so it can 

heat the transfer oil efficiently.

“Lots of things come into play when focusing light,” Gawlik 

said. “We have to consider the reflectivity of the surface, the 

accuracy of the surface and then aiming all of the light into the 

narrow focal line of the receiver tube.”

Typically, a parabolic trough operates at nearly 80% optical 

efficiency, and SkyFuel expects its design to function at least as 

well, while being less expensive to manufacture, transport, and 

maintain.

The NREL test will span portions of at least three seasons to 

explore the unit’s performance under a variety of weather conditions and sun angles.

“There is a cascade of opportunities to lose some light at every 

step in the process,” Gawlik said. “That’s why we field test 

the whole unit and get solid data over a number of months. It 

removes the uncertainty in the final efficiency result.”

Future Concentrating Solar Power Plants

The NREL tests will not include actual electricity generation 

because that step in the process uses conventional steam turbine 

technology. But it is that hybrid combination of the renewable and 

the conventional that makes CSP appealing to utilities as a source 

of cleaner bulk power during peak and intermediate load periods.

Parabolic trough power plants also require relatively large tracts 

of nearly level open land with strong solar characteristics, as well 

transmission lines and other infrastructure. These factors make 

Southwestern states the leading candidates for additional CSP 

installations; in California, the Solar Energy Generating Systems 

plants have been operating for two decades.

By 2015, the Western Governors’ Association estimates that 4 

gigawatts of new concentrating solar power plants could be 

built in the United States.

— Joseph B. Verrengia (Jan. 9, 2009)
26

WEATHERING SYSTEM CUTS 

PRODUCT TESTING TIME

NREL’s Ultra-Accelerated Weathering System tests products

for outdoor durability. Researchers who worked on the project

include (left to right), Judy Netter, NREL; Henry Hardcastle,

Atlas Material Testing Technology; and Al Lewandowski, Gary

Jorgensen and Carl Bingham of NREL. Credit: Joe Poellot/PIX 16793

E

ngineers design a new auto paint, a better solar device, or 

a sturdier vinyl siding. But how can they know if the new 

products deserve a five-year, 10-year or 30-year warranty, 

with the sun beating down on it day after day?

Better a leap in technology than a leap of faith.

A senior scientist at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), working with researchers in Russia and Arizona, 

has come up with a way to shine the equivalent of 50 suns on 

new products that need to be tested for outdoor durability.

Beyond the ‘Rip Van Winkle’ 

Approach

Product manufacturers can find out

in 10 weeks how their new paints or 

new anti-corrosive materials will look 

in 10 years.

“What’s been done in the past is the Rip 

Van Winkle approach to testing,” NREL 

senior scientist Gary Jorgensen said. 

“You put a product on exposure outdoors and go to sleep for 20 years. You 

wake up and see how long it lasted.”

How to accelerate the effects of weather has long been a 

conundrum for the products testing industry.

The challenge has been how to simulate the effects of decades 

of the sun’s rays, without getting things so hot that the product gets destroyed because it heats up more than it ever would 

in the real world. If the product gets too hot, it will blister, 

peel, melt, or otherwise fail to function.

Sun damage on outdoor products comes almost exclusively 

from the ultraviolet rays in the spectrum, the same light that 

causes skin cancer in humans. The thermal load itself does 

little damage. However, the thermal load of five or 10 or 50 

suns certainly would damage the sample. 

The nub: How to let the ultraviolet light in, but block the visible and near-infrared parts of the solar spectrums.

Fruit of a 15-Year-Old Idea

NREL’s new Ultra-Accelerated Weathering System (UAWS) 

is able to reflect virtually all of the sun’s ultraviolet rays onto 

the samples, but attenuate the visible and near-infrared rays. 

The result is a system that quickly gives an accurate portrait of 

what the sun will do to a product in 10, 20, or 30 years.

The seeds of the idea go back almost 15 years. In the mid1990s, NREL was involved with a national consortium trying 

to address a critical industry need: highly accelerated testing to allow companies to predict with confidence what the 

service-life guarantee should be on their products.

The automobile industry alone spends about $18 billion a 

year fulfilling service guarantees associated with their paint 

systems. It is crucial to know how long the warranties should 

be—and they can’t wait 15 years to find out.

“It occurred to me that at NREL we already had a high-flux 

solar furnace that could provide exposures of 2,000 suns,” 

Jorgensen recalled. 

The furnace wasn’t suitable for product testing, though, 

because it couldn’t shine rays evenly over samples.

“We wanted to scale back from 2,000 suns to 50 or 100, and at 

the same time have the solar flux become much more uniform,” Jorgensen said.

From Russia, with Mirrors

Serendipitously, an NREL scientist 

working on the furnace also was 

embarking on a separate project to 

homogenize the solar flux. “We had 

all the components there that we 

needed,” Jorgensen said. “It was 

just a matter of putting existing 

pieces together and initiating our 

new project.” 

NREL researchers got going, but 

found they needed help. The scientists looked back to the end of the 

Cold War to find it.

“What’s been done in the past 

is the Rip Van Winkle approach 

to testing. You put a product on 

exposure outdoors and go to sleep 

for 20 years. You wake up and see 

how long it lasted.” – Gary Jorgensen
CONCENTRATING SOLAR POWER 

27

The U.S. government had freed up some money to put former 

Soviet nuclear weapons scientists back to work. The aim of

the Initiative for Proliferation Prevention was to re-employ

the laid off Soviet scientists so they wouldn’t be tempted to 

sell weapons technology to unstable regimes in order to feed 

their families.

“The Russian group designed the coated mirrors and the 

faceted mirror array,” he said. “They were able to work on a 

socially redeeming project.”

The UAWS has an array of 29 square mirrors with spherical 

curves. Just as a light house uses numerous pieces of bent 

glass to magnify light, the UAWS uses the curves of the

many mirrors to concentrate the 

UV portion of natural sunlight.

Each of the mirrors has 96 layers 

of vacuum deposited coatings on 

them, Jorgensen said. Each layer 

of film uses alternating high- and 

low-refractive materials. The thickness of each layer helps produce 

mismatched refractions which, in 

turn, transmit some wavelengths 

and reflect other wavelengths back 

toward the sample chamber.

The array reflects the UV portion of 

the solar spectrum back to a chamber that holds the samples, which 

is on an arm about 10 feet away from the array.

Turning Down the Heat 

By attenuating most of the thermal and infra-red spectra—

that is, not letting them reflect back to the samples—the 

system keeps the heat down to about 35°C (95°F) for some 

tests, about 65°C (149°F) for others. “It’s called spectral

splitting,” Jorgensen said.

The samples still can get awfully hot just with the small sliver 

of thermal energy allowed in. So, to more precisely simulate the damage the actual sun will do over time, samples 

being tested are attached by vacuum to chilled copper blocks 

during exposure. Also, cool air blows across the surface of the 

samples to keep the temperature down.

NREL scientists have been able to successfully correlate 

exposure at the UAWS with real-time outdoor exposures and 

exposures in controlled laboratory chambers that use artificial 

lights sources. Using the UAWS they have demonstrated

product lifetimes of 20 years based on two summer’s worth

of exposure. NREL also involved Atlas Materials Testing

Technology, a global leader in product testing, with headquarters in Phoenix. 

“The best acceleration technology was at the level of five or six 

suns,” Jorgensen said. “We told them we could do better than 

that by a factor of 10. They got really excited and interested. 

They’re now commercializing the technology.”

Award-Winning Technology

UAWS is expected to be a hit with manufacturers of car paints, 

as well as the aerospace and electronics industries, the Department of Defense and designers of anti-corrosion materials for 

bridges and buildings. “Anything that is expected to last in an 

outdoor environment could benefit from the accelerated testing,” Jorgensen said.

Pharmaceutical and biomedicine companies also could become customers 

because they need to know the effect 

of UV on human tissue, as well as “the 

efficacy of UV blocking agents” such as 

sunscreen, Jorgensen said.

NREL scientists Jorgensen, Al Lewandowski, Carl Bingham, and Judy 

Netter, together with collaborators at 

the Institute of Laser Optic Technology 

in Moscow and Atlas Material Testing 

Technology, earned a prestigious R&D 

100 award in 2009 for the new technology. Called the “Oscars of Invention,” 

the awards are presented by R&D 

Magazine.

NREL has a UAWS on South Table Mountain near its headquarters in Golden, Colorado. Half-inch square samples of 

new products are attached to the device, complete with the 

chillers and the coolers. The mirrors let ultra-violet do its 

damage but block most of the heat and the rest of the solar 

spectrum from the samples.

“This answers the question: ‘Will it last for 20 years?’ in a 

20-week time frame,” Jorgensen said. “It gives a tremendous 

competitive advantage to companies that will test this way.”

— Bill Scanlon (Sept. 25, 2009)

“The best acceleration technology 

was at the level of five or six suns. 

We told them we could do better 

than that by a factor of 10. They 

got really excited and interested. 

They’re now commercializing the 

technology.” – Gary Jorgensen
28

AWARD-WINNING REFLECTOR

TO CUT SOLAR COST

SkyFuels Chief Tech Technology Officer Randy Gee, left, and NREL 

Senior Scientist Gary Jorgensen developed a thin silver polymer 

film to substitute for bulkier glass mirrors on solar-collecting 

troughs. Credit: Pat Corkery/ PIX 16464

Huge parabolic mirrors catching the sun’s rays could

crisscross America’s deserts soon, thanks to a breakthrough that may greatly lower the cost of solar power.

A small solar company has teamed with scientists at

the National Renewable Energy 

Laboratory (NREL) to develop

massive curved sheets of metal that 

have the potential to be 30% less 

expensive than today’s best collectors of concentrated solar power.

The SkyTrough Parabolic Trough 

Solar Concentrating Collectors will 

be longer than football fields and 

look like fun-house mirrors, but 

could be the game-changers in solar 

energy’s bid to out-muscle gas and 

coal in providing electricity for 

America’s homes.

The breakthrough recently was honored by R&D Magazine as one of the top 100 technical innovations of the year, and by the Federal Laboratory Consortium 

with a 2009 Excellence in Technology Transfer Award.

Solar power has been nipping at the heels of fossil fuels for 

decades, but hasn’t yet found a way to be cost-competitive on 

a large scale.

‘The Sky is the Limit’

That could change, says NREL senior scientist Gary Jorgensen, 

who with SkyFuel Chief Technology Officer Randy Gee developed a thin silver polymer film to substitute for bulkier glass 

mirrors on solar-collecting troughs.

“Glass is highly durable, but is heavy and hard to shape 

without added cost,” Jorgensen said. “Once industry sees the 

advantages of the silver polymer and is convinced the product 

is durable in an outdoor environment, the sky is the limit.”

Gee said the film, trademarked ReflecTech® Mirror Film, 

“has the same performance as the heavy glass mirrors, but 

at a much lower cost and much lower weight. It also is much 

easier to deploy and install.” The glossy film uses several 

layers of polymers, with an inner layer of pure silver.

The government scientist and the chief technology officer 

say the cost advantage is about 30%, a huge dividend in an 

industry that has scratched together savings one percent at a 

time for decades.

Solar scientists for years have understood the advantage of 

the parabolic shape, which distorts the rays, concentrating the 

sun’s heat onto a tube filled with heat-transfer fluid, which 

carries the heat to the boilers in a power station. 

The heat-transfer fluid can get as hot as 400°C (more than 750°F).

More than 10 Years in the Making

The thorny problem has been how to find an alternative to 

glass, something that is cheaper and lighter, easier to install, 

yet durable in the hot sun.

The story goes back to the late 1990s, when Gee and Jorgensen 

worked with a small $25,000 federal grant to see if they could 

come up with an alternative reflector.

They used NREL’s testing facilities 

to sample dozens, indeed hundreds, 

of possible materials that potentially 

provided the low-weight low-cost 

highly flexible properties needed to 

drive down the cost of solar power 

collection.

“Within two years, we had enough 

data to believe we had a substantial 

improvement relative to predecessors,” Jorgensen recalled.

They found that silver had great 

potential, but that by itself the metal 

would delaminate and corrode too easily. It’s the combination 

of metals and polymer film layers that protect the silver that 

makes the film commercially viable.

“Glass is highly durable, but is 

heavy and hard to shape without 

added cost. Once industry sees the 

advantages of the silver polymer 

and is convinced the product is 

durable in an outdoor environment, 

the sky is the limit.” – Gary Jorgensen
CONCENTRATING SOLAR POWER 

29

 “We reduced the concept to practice and filed for the patent,” 

Jorgensen said. SkyFuel now holds the exclusive license for 

using the patented technology developed by both Gee and 

Jorgensen.

NREL’s technology transfer office aims to make it easier for 

private industry to invest in renewable energy by developing mutually beneficial partnerships, including teaming on 

research and patents.

A prototype SkyTrough is capturing the sun’s rays right now 

atop South Table Mountain overlooking NREL’s Golden, 

Colorado, campus; a larger pilot system also has been installed 

at SkyFuel’s location in Arvada, Colorado, a few miles north of 

NREL. The parabolas could spring up by the end of the year in 

the highest desert regions of California, and soon in Arizona, 

Nevada, New Mexico, Texas and Colorado, states blessed with 

lots of sunshine and vast open areas.

Parabolic collectors have been around since the 1970s. Back 

then they were about seven feet wide and 20 feet long, a half 

dozen or so lined up to collect the sun’s rays, a motorized 

system turning the mirrors as the sun moved across the sky.

“The natural evolution was to get larger and reduce costs,” 

said Gee, who worked with Jorgensen in the 1980s at the Solar 

Energy Resource Institute, NREL’s predecessor. “Each generation got larger,” pointing to the day when utility companies 

would want to purchase the troughs for 50- to 100-megawatt 

plants.

In commercial use, a SkyTrough would measure 375 feet long 

and 20 feet high. One SkyTrough would supply enough electricity for at least 50 homes.

Gee describes the technology transfer as a natural outgrowth 

of NREL’s presence in a large metro area. “Just the fact that 

you have that level of expertise in a national lab, you’re going 

to have naturally occurring spinoffs. This didn’t occur through 

any particular program, other than the contact between different people in the research community in this particular area of 

solar.”

Gee recalls the methodical testing of samples at NREL’s optical 

materials lab. “Bit by bit, we improved the performance of 

these samples,” he said.

“The real important moment came when we filed the patent. 

It took many years of working through the patent process, but 

we were rewarded with it in 2007.”

‘Perfect Storm’ for Renewable Energy

SkyFuel’s R&D Center in Arvada has 16 employees, mainly 

scientists and engineers that have been improving the design 

of the SkyTrough.

“Just two-and-a-half years into the development cycle, it looks 

like our great technical team is going to be able to take a big 

chunk out of the costs of installing CSP systems,” Gee said. 

“We’re not doing this in tiny steps but in big chunks.”

NREL’s contribution to the breakthrough film “was absolutely 

critical,” Gee said. “Over the past two years, we’ve had the 

ability to ask the scientists there, where they have the optical test equipment, to come over and bring their specialized 

equipment to measure the accuracy our parabolic trough 

collector.”

“It was absolutely important for us to verify the optics of our 

technology before we put it in the field.”

Several utilities that have installed expensive fossil-fired plants 

in the past decade “are very excited about solar in general, and 

many of them see our technology as a very important part of 

that,” Gee said. 

Gee maintains that it all could have come together years ago, 

if not for wavering. “It requires political will to make this 

happen,” Gee said. “There’s no reason why we couldn’t be 20 

years ahead of the game, compared to where we are now.

“A lot of work in materials has evolved,” Gee added. “It 

remains to be seen whether this time we break through. It 

depends on how seriously climate change is taken, what sort 

of actions are taken to move us away from fossil fuels.”

Jorgensen has been working on renewable energy for 30 years. 

He calls today’s climate “a perfect storm ... with the realization by the public of the importance of alternative energy, with 

politicians listening to the public, with energy demands, and 

with security issues of not wanting to rely on foreign oil.”

“With the whole impact of global environmental change, we’re 

truly at the pinnacle of a golden age,” Jorgensen said.

— Bill Scanlon (Aug. 3, 2009)

Kathleen Stynes removes the cover from the heat

transfer tube on the prototype SkyTrough on

South Table Mountain overlooking NREL’s Golden,

Colorado, campus. Credit: Pat Corkery/PIX 16465
30

NEW LABS TO CONCENTRATE

ON SOLAR THERMAL ENERGY

NREL Senior Scientist Cheryl Kennedy holds a sample of an

experimental mirror coating to increase the efficiency of

concentrating solar power. NREL is receiving $5.4 million in

ARRA funding for new laboratories to accelerate CSP research

and development. Credit: Pat Corkery PIX 16815

A

s the market for clean solar power rapidly expands, 

researchers at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) are investigating advanced concepts in concentrating solar power (CSP) with $5.4 million in American 

Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) funding awarded 

from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE).

The new work includes establishing two new facilities and extensive 

improvements to an existing third 

facility on the NREL’s research 

campus. It also will include field 

testing of new CSP technologies at 

the Solar Technology Acceleration 

Center (SolarTAC), a new 76-acre 

solar test site.

CSP uses mirrors to reflect sunlight 

onto receivers. Unlike photovoltaic 

cells that directly convert sunlight 

into electricity, this method uses the 

sun’s heat to drive a generator to 

produce electricity. 

Key to CSP’s commercial success is developing an economical, 

effective energy storage capability that will hold the sun’s heat 

for use to generate clean electricity at periods of peak power 

demand, or during cloudy weather or at night.

NREL is studying new thermal storage materials and technologies that will allow CSP plants to work at higher temperatures and greater efficiencies, while lowering the cost of 

energy produced by these systems.

DOE’s goal is to make CSP cost-competitive by 2015 and

provide a sizeable amount of clean energy to the grid by 2020.

Rapid growth expected 

CSP plants are generating about 600 megawatts of electricity 

today, mostly in the United States and Spain. An additional 

1,000 megawatts are under construction by utilities in sunny 

regions such as the desert Southwest.

In the United States, an additional 8 gigawatts of CSP are 

being planned. Internationally, a similar level of CPS development is underway.

NREL maintains an online database of CSP projects and 

technologies with SolarPACES, an international cooperative 

organization, to track CPS development worldwide.

NREL and Sandia National Laboratories are funded by DOE 

to develop CSP technologies.

“The CSP industry is growing rapidly and needs DOE’s help 

to evaluate technologies that will make projects more financeable,” said CSP program manager Mark Mehos.

“The industry needs performance and durability data in 

everything from materials to systems,” he said. “And on the 

R&D side, these new facilities will help us develop the next 

generation of materials and systems.”

Two of the NREL facilities—the Advanced Thermal Storage 

Process and Components Integration Laboratory and the Optical Components Characterization Laboratory—will be located 

in NREL’s new Energy Systems Integration Facility (ESIF), 

which is scheduled to be completed in late 2011. 

Department of Energy funding will be used in four important 

areas: 

1. Advanced Thermal Storage Process 

and Components Integration Laboratory, 

$660,000. 

Economically storing thermal energy for 

generating electricity during peak utility 

load periods is vital if CSP is going to help 

meet clean energy demand. Mehos said 

this new facility would include two test 

units—one 15 kilowatt and the other 100 

kilowatt—to evaluate advanced CSP heat 

transfer fluids and thermal energy storage 

methods. The lab will test concepts being 

developed through grants awarded to 

industry and universities for developing 

advanced fluids and storage concepts.

2. Advanced Optical Materials and Optical Components 

Characterization and Integration Laboratories, $1.36 million.

NREL’s existing advanced optical materials laboratories 

develop and test new lower-cost, durable optics and coatings 

“We can’t wait 30 years to find 

out if the new mirrors for CSP 

systems will actually last for 30 

years. We do acceleration tests 

in these chambers that will be 

working 24 hours a day, seven 

days a week.” – Cheryl Kennedy
CONCENTRATING SOLAR POWER 

31

for mirrors and receivers. Weatherization chambers currently 

expose a large number of advanced reflector materials under 

accelerated conditions of ultraviolet light, temperature, and 

humidity. An advanced deposition chamber is being used to 

develop advanced reflector and absorber coatings. A diverse 

set of optical characterization equipment is used to evaluate 

the optical properties of advanced materials. Currently NREL 

has three laboratories located in the Field Test Laboratory 

Building doing versions of this work. A portion of the funding 

will be used to expand the capabilities within each of these 

laboratories.

Mark Mehos, manager of the concentrating solar power program, 

says much of the ARRA funding for the CPS program will be spent

on new facilities to improve thermal storage and other CSP

technologies. Credit: Pat Corkery/PIX 16816

NREL researchers already have worked with one CSP company, Sky Fuel of Albuquerque, New Mexico, to develop a 

film-based optical coating on an aluminum parabolic shaped 

substrate to replace heavier, breakable glass mirrors. That 

development won a 2009 R&D 100 award. “Sky Fuel’s material 

is the furthest along,” Mehos said. “But other companies—3M, 

Alcoa, Abengoa—also are looking at new materials.”

Some equipment for the ARRA-funded improvements is being 

installed now at NREL’s Advanced Optical Materials Laboratory, including four new WeatherOmeters to test mirrors and 

other CSP components. At $120,000 to $160,000 apiece, these 

advanced chambers use xenon arc lamps and other systems 

to concentrate sunlight at about seven times typical outdoor 

exposure. They also simulate the freeze-thaw cycle and other 

conditions.

“We can’t wait 30 years to find out if the new mirrors for CSP 

systems will actually last for 30 years,” said NREL senior scientist Cheryl Kennedy who leads the advanced materials team 

developing and testing reflector and absorber materials. “We 

do acceleration tests in these chambers that will be working 24 

hours a day, seven days a week.”

NREL also supports optical characterization of industryfurnished collectors and mirror facets at an indoor laboratory 

located at NREL’s Joyce Street facility. Currently, the only 

practical orientation for indoor and field testing of complete 

parabolic trough modules has been an arrangement in which 

the collector axis points to the horizon. 

However, rarely—if ever—does the CSP collector point 

toward the horizon during normal operation. Mehos said it 

is important to test these collectors under standard operating 

conditions where effects like gravity can impact optical performance. With this in mind, the funding will allow researchers 

to develop an overhead test configuration that will accommodate full parabolic trough module testing in the vertical 

position to more closely simulate real-world operations.

3. Nanomaterials for Thermal Energy Storage in CSP Plants, 

$1 million.

This project will develop new nanomaterials and encapsulation strategies that could lead to significant improvements 

in the thermal energy storage density for CSP systems. The 

nanostructure research leverages NREL’s existing fundamental 

materials research program.

4. Advanced Thermal Energy Storage Test and Evaluation 

Facility, $2.4 million.

This pilot-scale facility will be built 30 miles east of the laboratory in Aurora, Colorado, at the new SolarTAC. The SolarTAC 

site near Denver International Airport is being privately 

developed as a test site for industry with NREL’s participation, 

both for large-scale photovoltaic and CSP trials. Being able to 

test advanced thermal energy storage systems for CSP at scale 

is essential to developing and deploying these new concepts 

commercially. The proposed pilot-scale storage facility will 

provide a general-purpose test bed available specifically to 

support DOE laboratory, industry, and university test and 

evaluation activities.

NREL’s plans were endorsed in letters to DOE by more than 

two dozen corporate and university leaders in solar research.

“One of the key advantages is that it will be possible to get 

direct comparisons of competing thermal energy storage 

concepts,” said Henry Price, vice president of technology 

development at Abengoa Solar Inc. “More cost-effective forms 

of thermal energy storage need to be developed.”

— Joseph B. Verrengia (Dec. 18, 2009)
32

CONFERENCE TACKLES

INTERSTATE TRANSMISSION

Moving clean electricity to cities from distant wind and solar 

farms will require complex interstate agreements. Some western 

states may try to model their agreements after interstate

compacts like those that have regulated water diversion for 

nearly 100 years. Credit: Warren Gretz/PIX 10927

 t sounds like a dreaded word problem on a final exam:

More than 50% of the best class 5-7 winds in the Western U.S. occur 

in southern Wyoming. Southern California’s population is expected 

to grow by 74% by 2030 to 23 million residents, and will need all the 

low-cost renewable power it can get. How do you build a transmission line to carry that clean electricity across mountain ranges, sensitive wildlife habitat and 1,000 miles of public and private property 

in as many as five states? 

There is no certain answer, says NREL

senior energy analyst David Hurlbut, 

because building new transmission for 

renewable energy is less of a technical 

question and more of a policy issue. 

Hurlbut and the laboratory’s Strategic 

Energy Analysis Center recently convened NREL’s first conference to address 

the issue of interstate collaboration on 

transmission policy. They started with 

regulators, policymakers, and legal 

analysts from four states likely to be 

affected—Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, and 

New Mexico. 

Proceedings of the Conference on Multistate Decision-making 

for Renewable Energy and Transmission will be published 

in the University of Colorado Law Journal. Additional meetings 

that would focus other groups of neighboring states are being 

discussed.

“To achieve the large scale potential of renewable energy in 

the most cost-effective way, we have to solve the transmission issue and aside from the federal government there is no 

institution with multi-state jurisdiction over transmission,” 

Hurlbut said. “Federal preemption makes states nervous especially in the West, so it’s fair to ask what states themselves can 

do in collaboration with one another. 

“There has been a lot of attention paid to the technical aspects 

of renewable energy. But this is political—deciding where to 

build a line and how to pay for it.”

Transmission’s Critical Crossroads

At the NREL conference, participants examined how each of 

the four states regulates electricity transmission now and how 

they might cooperatively approach building new lines to carry 

power from clean, renewable sources.

The nation’s transmission system is at a critical crossroads. 

Rising power demands and transmission bottlenecks make it 

difficult to keep the power grid operating smoothly. 

Renewable energy adds an additional challenge. The nation’s 

windiest and sunniest locations often are located far from 

major cities. Under some scenarios, this new transmission 

capacity could include 19,000 miles of new lines at a cost of 

$60 billion.

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) recently identified 

transmission limitations as a chief roadblock to obtaining 20% 

of our electricity from the wind as detailed in its report, “20% 

Wind Energy by 2030.” 

In the United States, each state determines how transmission 

lines will be sited within its borders. New projects generally 

must demonstrate they are serving a public need, but how 

that need is defined varies, as well as how local impacts are 

evaluated. Issues such as clean energy and climate change are 

pressing state authorities to broaden how they approach the 

question of need.

Interstate Compact Offers

Historic Model

The NREL conference was an early 

opportunity for the participating states to 

explore policy approaches towards new 

renewable energy transmission.

The most likely framework is an interstate compact, conference speakers said.

Interstate compacts are binding agreements between two or more states in 

which they accept the jurisdiction of other 

I

“A congressionally approved 

compact generally shields 

the states from certain kinds 

of federal preemption, 

which is a major concern in 

renewable energy projects 

right now.” – Robin Craig
ELECTRIC INFRASTRUCTURE SYSTEMS 

33

states over a shared resource, service, or facility. Compacts 

must be approved by the legislatures of the participating 

states as well as Congress—a process that can take years. Once 

approved, the states hold the power over the project.

“A congressionally approved compact generally shields the 

states from certain kinds of federal preemption, which is a 

major concern in renewable energy projects right now,” said 

Robin Craig, associate dean for environmental programs at the 

Florida State University College of Law and a featured speaker 

at the NREL conference.

Prominent examples of interstate facilities run under compacts 

include the New York-New Jersey Port Authority and the 

transportation authority serving the District of Columbia and 

suburbs in northern Virginia and Maryland. 

Interstate compacts that manage natural resources across state 

lines offer specific guidance because they deal with both infrastructure and seasonally variable resources.

For example, the Colorado River Compact has been allocating water since 1922 in seven Western states—many of the 

same states that have vast potential to produce wind and 

solar power and where power demand also is dramatically 

increasing.

Craig said renewable energy states can draw on decades of 

lessons if the energy resource changes or renewable energy 

prices shift dramatically.

“The beauty of interstate compacts is that they have no set 

substantive requirements—states are free to negotiate the contents of the compact as they think will work best,” Craig said.

NREL senior energy analyst David Hurlbut organized the conference 

to highlight the policy challenges facing both energy-exporting 

states and major demand centers.

Credit: Joe Verrengia/PIX 16892

If It Walks Like a Duck

If states don’t want to form an interstate compact, others said 

they must be careful not to create a transmission agreement 

that tries to act like a compact, but sidesteps the approval 

process. It’s that additional legislative scrutiny that reinforces 

the compact’s binding nature and reduces risk.

“When one state agrees it will be bound by the decisions of 

another state, then they start going down the compact road,” 

said Commissioner James Tarpey, who attended the conference for the Colorado Public Utilities Commission.

The voluntary nature of alternative agreements may generate uneasiness as well, especially considering that transmission lines are expensive and expected to remain in place for 

decades.

“There needs to be sufficient certainty regarding cost allocation among the states, resulting in recovery of the capital 

invested and a reasonable profit, over the long term.” Tarpey 

said. “Otherwise, Wall Street may not be willing to invest or 

will only be willing to do so at a cost commensurate with the 

perceived risk.” 

“If you are going to go forward with renewable energy,” 

Tarpey said, “this is an example of the issues you need to start 

grappling with.”

— Joseph B. Verrengia (Oct. 2, 2009)
34

NREL ASSIGNS RENEWABLES 

EXPERTS TO HAWAII, ALASKA

A 10.5 MW wind farm near the northern tip of Hawaii’s Big Island 

has been generating electricity since 2006. Courtesy of Hawaiian Electric 

Light Company (HELCO)/PIX 14697

NREL has dispatched clean energy experts to Hawaii

and Alaska to work as advisors to local policymakers 

and utilities.

At a glance, the two states couldn’t appear to be more

different—tropical and small versus Arctic and huge.

However, Hawaii and Alaska both have considerable renewable energy resources, including solar, wind, geothermal, 

biomass, and wave energy. 

And because of their remote locations, they have the nation’s highest 

energy costs and rely almost exclusively on fossil fuels. 

Department of Energy (DOE) and 

NREL officials recognize that both 

states could serve as renewable 

energy models for the Lower 48. 

But integrating renewables into the 

states’ economies and infrastructures 

is a complex job that won’t get done 

simply by offering advice from the 

lab’s Golden, Colorado, campus.

The programs are modeled on successful recent DOE and lab clean 

energy efforts in Greensburg, Kansas,

and New Orleans.

“To accomplish something on the ground, you have to have 

experts on the ground,” said Mary Werner, the lab’s executive 

manager of integrated deployment. “Being there in real time is 

a critical piece in getting a community—or an entire state—to 

move in the same direction towards renewable energy goals.”

Clean Energy in a Generation

In Hawaii, two NREL senior project leaders have started working directly with state officials, utilities, and the private sector 

to help implement the Hawaii Clean Energy Initiative (HCEI). 

The HCEI is a partnership between DOE and the state that 

was formed in January 2008 to help Hawaii generate 70% of 

its energy from clean sources by 2030. It’s an aggressive plan; 

according to the lab’s 2008 State of the States report, Hawaii 

ranks 46th in the amount of renewable energy flowing to its 

electricity grid. More than 90% of its electricity and fuel comes 

from fossil fuels shipped to the islands.

As part of the HCEI, Gov. Linda Lingle and state lawmakers 

met with DOE officials and researchers in July at the lab.

On March 16, 2009, Paul Norton started as the lab’s senior 

project leader in Hawaii to work with the Energy Efficiency 

Branch in the Department of Business, Economic Development 

and Tourism’s (DBEDT) State Energy Office. Norton brings 14 

years of residential buildings research and analysis experience, 

but his portfolio will expand to include all renewable technologies in the HCEI. 

NREL’s second advisor, Debra Lew, is a senior project leader 

for transmission and integration with the National Wind 

Technology Center. Lew is helping Hawaii’s utilities learn how 

to integrate wind and solar power on the electricity grid, and 

manage the effects of these variable resources on utility operations and costs. 

“Hawaii doesn’t have the benefit of 14 neighboring states to 

help keep a shared grid in balance when it adds wind and 

solar power,” Werner said. “Each island has its own microgrid, where putting in high levels of 

variable renewable energy sources will 

be extremely difficult to do.”

Norton and Lew are married, making 

the complex field assignment a “fortuitous” pairing, Werner said.

Dozens of Renewable Initiatives 

In addition to new solar and wind farms 

and planned zero-energy communities, 

the state and the Hawaiian Electric Company are pursuing an undersea cable to 

connect several islands, and transmit 

an additional 400 MW of wind power 

to Honolulu and the island of Oahu, 

where most residents and tourists are 

concentrated.

“Hawaii doesn’t have the benefit 

of 14 neighboring states to help 

keep a shared grid in balance 

when it adds wind and solar 

power. Each island has its own 

micro-grid, where putting in 

high levels of variable renewable 

energy sources will be extremely 

difficult to do.” – Mary Werner
ENERGY ANALYSIS 

35

Hawaii also is establishing a “feed-in tariff” that would pay 

a standard rate for power fed into the grid from renewable 

energy systems, and eliminating caps on the amount of electricity homeowners can send to the grid from their own PV 

and wind systems.

The NREL team’s portfolio is likely to grow. Norton says state 

lawmakers are considering another three dozen renewable 

energy bills.

“Less than 24 hours after Debbie and I arrived, Gov. Lingle 

invited us to her office,” Norton said. “She is strongly committed to this program.”

 This family’s home in a remote village in Alaska is powered by a 

solar/diesel hybrid system featuring 4 kW of solar panels and two 

diesel generators. Fuel is expensive in Alaska and makes renewable 

energy a competitive seasonal energy option.

Courtesy of Northern Power Systems/PIX 08963

High Tech Villages

In Alaska, Brian Hirsch of Homer has been named as the lab’s 

representative in the nation’s largest state. 

Hirsch, who holds a Ph.D. in natural resources, formerly was 

development director for the Yukon River Inter-Tribal Watershed Council, a coalition of 64 Tribes and First Nations in 

Alaska and Canada. His projects have included village wind 

turbines, a small in-river hydrokinetic turbine in the Yukon 

River and photovoltaic panels in Arctic Village, a community 

above the Arctic Circle.

Alaska is one of the nation’s leading oil and gas producing 

states. It ranks 39th in renewable energy on its grid, virtually 

all of which comes from hydroelectric dams. 

Hirsch will focus on bringing renewable power to a state that 

has among the nation’s highest energy prices—as much as $1 

per kilowatt hour in remote villages.

“He knows renewable energy and he has well-established

relationships,” Werner said.

— Joseph B. Verrengia (March 27, 2009)

A volcanic vent on Hawaii’s Big Island glows with heat from lava 

than exceeds 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Hawaii has one geothermal 

power plant that generates 30% of the Big Island’s electricity.

Courtesy of John Lund, Geo-Heat Center/PIX 13101
36

NREL ENERGY ANALYSTS DIG INTO 

FEED-IN TARIFFS

NREL energy analysts Claire Kreycik, left, and Karlynn Cory

have examined feed-in tariffs in North America and Europe.

Credit: Joe Verrengia/PIX 16878

F

eed-in tariffs (FiTs) are the world’s most widely used 

policy to drive renewable energy development. They have 

helped transform cloudy Germany into the world leader of 

installed solar power and photovoltaic manufacturing. 

Now FiTs are stimulating green energy investment in North 

America, too.

Locations as disparate as the city of 

Gainesville, Florida, the province of 

Ontario, Canada, and the state of Washington recently have adopted measures 

establishing guaranteed long-term prices 

for clean electricity. A dozen more states 

and many more communities are considering similar energy policy proposals.

NREL energy analysts are digging into 

these complex policies in a series of 

technical reports designed to inform 

government policy makers, clean 

energy investors, utilities, and other 

stakeholders. 

Stability, Reduced Risk Attracts Investors

Feed-in tariffs guarantee long-term payments at pre-established rates for the electricity generated from renewable 

sources. The production-based payments are often higher than 

market rates, but are on the verge of becoming competitive in 

specific locations for certain technologies such as wind power. 

While utilities are obligated to buy the power, the long-term 

payments help encourage renewable energy development by 

reducing risks for investors. Any added costs are typically 

passed along to ratepayers and, for technologies like wind 

and landfill gas, may provide a hedge against electricity price 

volatility and large price spikes over the long-term. 

According to the NREL studies, experience around the world 

suggests that FiTs can effectively expand renewable energy 

deployment and remove barriers to renewable energy development, while creating jobs and helping meet renewable 

energy standards. 

Best Programs Tailored to Local Conditions

States—or even local communities—may be tempted to copy 

the successful German model word for word. But, NREL analysts say that FiTs are most effective when the policy design is 

adapted to local context.

“Every jurisdiction has unique characteristics that will influence the details of the FiT design and affect its success—these 

local differences are critical to consider,” said Karlynn Cory, 

co-author of “State Clean Energy Policies Analysis (SCEPA) 

Project: An Analysis of Renewable Energy Feed-in Tariffs in 

the United States”.

The NREL reports examine a wide range of FiT programs. For 

example, Gainesville’s tariff is limited to photovoltaic projects 

with a total city-wide cap of 4 megawatts. Under Washington 

state’s FiT policy, solar PV, solar thermal, wind, and anaerobic 

digesters are offered a payment that differs by technology and 

that increases if system components are manufactured in-state. 

This spring, the Canadian province of Ontario revised its 

three-year old program to include a 20-year fixed price of as 

much as $0.69 for every kilowatt-hour of solar power generated. In response, SunEdison, First Solar, Everbrite Solar, and 

Nanosolar are developing both solar 

energy farms and manufacturing 

facilities near Ottawa, Kingston, and 

other cities.

Timely Topic

With so many tariff options, Cory 

said it is timely for the laboratory’s 

Strategic Energy Analysis Center to 

tackle the topic.

“Understanding the policy design 

options allows decision makers to 

formulate more effective policies for 

their specific circumstances,” Cory 

said. “This was a real opportunity for NREL to evaluate the 

key lessons learned in Europe and translate them to the U.S. 

context.”

The second NREL study of FiTs suggests that the policy can 

work effectively with renewable portfolio standards (RPS). 

“Every jurisdiction has unique 

characteristics that will influence 

the details of the FiT design 

and affect its success—these 

local differences are critical to 

consider.” – Karlynn Cory
ENERGY ANALYSIS 

37

States use RPS policies to set long-term requirements on how 

much renewable energy must be developed to meet consumer 

demand, boost clean energy development, and reduce their 

reliance on fossil fuels.

Cory co-authored that report, “Feed-in 

Tariff Policy: Design, Implementation, 

and RPS Policy Interactions,” with 

NREL analyst Claire Kreycik and Toby 

Couture, now of E3 Analytics. 

Kreycik recently briefed New York state 

policymakers on how FiTs can drive 

renewable energy deployment and job 

creation as they prepare to vote on a 

FiT proposal.

RPS mandates have been adopted in 

29 states and Congress is considering a national standard. However, not all of these policies are 

designed to address investors’ needs for revenue certainty. 

That’s where FiT programs can be complementary.

“RPS policies tend to set the requirement and let the market 

figure out how to get there,” Cory said. “FiT policies can help 

utilities meet their RPS target. It doesn’t have to be an eitheror choice.”

A third NREL report will focus on best practices for FiT policies. It will be completed later this year.

Key Factors to FiT Success

NREL analysts have identified several key factors in a successful FiT policy.

•	 Stability. Energy projects require several years to develop, 

so FiTs have to be in place five years or longer to encourage 

certainty with investors and manufacturers.

•	 Long-term contracts. Contracts in the range of 15–20 years 

allow investors time to recover their costs.

•	Adequate energy prices. FiTs 

must cover project costs, plus a 

reasonable return to create stability, attract investors, lower risk, 

and keep financing relatively 

simple.

•	Annually decreasing payments.

As innovation and growth reduce 

technology costs, tariffs should 

be lowered according to a transparent and incremental plan. 

This encourages rapid deployment and increases competition 

among manufacturers.

•	 Differentiate payments according to technology type, project 

size, and resource quality. 

•	 Incorporate FiT into the electricity rate base. Tying FiT payments to ratepayers distributes costs and provides certainty 

that investors will get paid.

•	 Reduce bureaucracy. Streamlining approvals reduces barriers and costs. Streamlining procedures especially helps 

small projects and encourages broader participation.

— Joseph B. Verrengia (June 12, 2009)

“RPS policies tend to set the 

requirement and let the market 

figure out how to get there.

FiT policies can help utilities meet 

their RPS target. It doesn’t have to 

be an either-or choice.” – Karlynn Cory
38

NREL UNCOVERS CLEAN ENERGY 

LEADERS STATE BY STATE

Clean energy projects in Maine such as the 42-megawatt Mars

Hill wind farm help the New England state rank first in the

nation in some renewable categories, according to NREL’s 2009 

State of the State report. Credit: Skip Babineau/PIX 15332

A

n exclusive state-by-state analysis by the U.S Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory 

(NREL) shows that clean energy development is spreading rapidly throughout the country, often in conjunction with 

public policies designed to spur such growth.

By 2007, 24 of the nation’s 50 states were generating at least 

1 gigawatt of renewable electricity from non-hydro sources, 

according to the 2009 NREL State of the 

States report. While states such as California and Texas with abundant resources 

continue to rank among the leading states 

in terms of total renewable electricity 

generation, the study shows that a range 

of other states are demonstrating strong 

growth in the clean energy sector, including those with historic fossil fuel legacies, 

such as Oklahoma and Illinois. 

Wind energy accounted for the largest percentage of nationwide growth in renewable generation between 2001 and 2007, 

including a 30% increase in 2006 and 2007.

Biomass generation continued to expand across most regions, 

with states as disparate as Delaware, Utah, Minnesota, and 

Alaska showing the most recent growth in the sector. Biomass 

generation continued to be strong in southeastern states, 

including Georgia, Alabama, and Florida.

The State of the States project was developed by the U.S. 

Department of Energy, NREL, and the American Council 

for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE). It is funded by 

the Department of Energy’s office of Energy Efficiency and 

Renewable Energy (EERE).

Not a Scorecard

This is the second annual State of the States report. NREL 

energy analysts began compiling new data and making initial 

comparisons February 2008. 

The 212-page report contains 101 charts dissecting major 

renewable energy technologies and policies, as well as an 

extensive appendix listing clean energy resources. While the 

report provides state-by-state comparisons, NREL authors said 

the report is not meant to be a renewable energy scorecard.

Its broader purpose is to document the interplay between 

renewable energy technology development, policy implementation and markets on the state level—and, as a result, to help 

make renewable energy development more effective.

“This is the only report that looks at data from every state 

and attempts to quantify the links between renewable energy 

development and policy implementation,” said NREL Senior 

Energy Analyst Joyce McLaren, who led the report team. 

“Of course, it’s interesting to know where and how much 

wind energy is being produced, but knowing that alone isn’t 

going to help move you forward,” McLaren said. “This report 

tries to identify how states are moving forward and which 

mechanisms are the most effective and efficient.”

Making the Policy-Energy Connection 

All but 14 U.S. states now have adopted renewable energy 

portfolio standards or goals. And, all but seven states have 

net-metering policies in place, which allow customers who 

generate their own electricity to send surplus power back to 

the grid and have it subtracted from their retail electricity use.

State policymakers who commented 

on the project in its draft stages said 

they were impressed by breadth and 

scope of the final report. Knowing 

what is taking place beyond your 

own state’s borders can be influential, they said, even when one state’s 

renewable energy resources are different from another’s.

“In recent years, our energy committee has been dealing with questions 

that are hyper-local, such as whether 

we should consider including wood 

from construction and demolition as 

a renewable resource for purposes of our renewable portfolio 

standard,” said Kevin McCarthy, principal analyst for the Connecticut General Assembly’s Office of Legislative Research.

“This report puts much more information at our fingertips and 

allows us to take a much broader view,” he said.

“This is the only report that 

looks at data from every state 

and attempts to quantify the 

links between renewable 

energy development and policy 

implementation.” – Joyce McLaren
ENERGY ANALYSIS 

39

The NREL report also provides observations about the effects 

of state-based renewable energy policies. 

McLaren said certain policies appear to be working particularly well in combination. For example, more renewable 

energy has been developed in states that require utilities both 

to disclose their fuel mix and offer customers the option to 

purchase electricity produced with renewable fuels. 

States that have a renewable portfolio standard appear to be 

generating more clean wind energy the longer the RPS has 

been in effect.

States that implemented net-metering legislation in 2005 had 

significantly more renewable energy generation by 2007 than 

states without such a policy. The analysts looked back in time 

in order to identify development trends and make the link 

between past policy implementation and current development. However, McLaren cautioned that the reliability of the 

conclusions will be strengthened if future analyses identify the 

same trends. 

“It’s when we see the same thing every year for three or four 

years that we can be confident in the result,” she said. “As 

the renewable energy field continues to develop, connections between policy and the ensuing development will only 

become more evident.”

The report also contains an extensive list of resources with 

online links to renewable energy information, maps, research 

centers, industry associations and related information from 

NREL and other institutions.

Key Findings

•	 Non-hydro renewable electricity generation as a percent 

of total electricity generation increased 33.7% between 

2001 and 2007, reaching a national total of 105 million 

megawatt-hours. 

•	 California led the nation in terms of total non-hydroelectric 

renewable generation in 2007; Maine is No. 1 when also 

considering state population and gross state product. 

•	 Washington led in total renewable generation in 2007 if 

hydroelectric resources are included.

•	 South Dakota ranks first in overall growth in non-hydro 

renewable energy generation between 2001 and 2007. 

•	 Geothermal electricity generation in the Lower 48 is

concentrated in California, Nevada, and Utah.

•	 Solar capacity is concentrated in the southwestern and 

northeastern states. 

•	 Leading wind energy states are Texas, California, Iowa, 

Minnesota, and Washington. However, sparsely populated 

Wyoming leads in per-capita wind generation.

— Joseph B. Verrengia (Nov. 20, 2009)

DC 

Puerto Rico 

U.S. Virgin Islands 

Guam 

American Samoa 

Alaska

Hawaii Policy in place

New in 2009 

Renewable portfolio goals 

Source: National Renewable Energy Laboratory, July 2009 

States that have a renewable energy portfolio standard appear to be generating more clean wind energy

the longer the RPS has been in effect. 

Credit: NREL
40

GOVERNOR HONORS ALTERNATIVE 

ENERGY ADVOCATE

Chuck Kutscher leads concentrating solar power research

using NREL’s Large Payload Solar Tracker. Credit: Sam Potts/PIX 16861

When you have the opportunity to spend 30 years working in a field you love, some might be worried about losing their zeal, but NREL’s Chuck Kutscher is a shining example of someone who continues to find new passions 

along the way.

His passion for identifying climate 

change solutions using renewable 

energy recently caught the attention 

of Colorado’s Gov. Bill Ritter. He presented Kutscher with the 2nd Annual 

Governor’s Excellence in Renewable 

Energy, Individual Award. “I was 

very surprised,” Kutscher said. “I 

had no idea I had been nominated.”

The governor’s award honors

outstanding contributions to

protect Colorado’s environment

and provide clean power through 

renewable energy. 

Kutscher has done all of this and 

more; from creating NREL’s first solar cooling test lab to 

leading research on the basic theory of the solar wall, he 

has researched concentrating solar power, solar heating and 

cooling and geothermal electricity. He is currently a principal 

engineer and group manager of the Thermal Systems Group in 

NREL’s Center for Electricity, Resources and Systems Integration, where once again he is taking the lead on concentrating solar power research using NREL’s Large Payload Solar 

Tracker.

A Climate Change Advocate

It’s what Kutscher has been doing outside of the office—educating people on the urgency of climate change and how it can 

be addressed— that’s also earned the attention of the Governor as well as the University of Colorado at Boulder and the 

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) 

Earth Systems Research Lab in Boulder, Colorado. 

In fact, it was a colleague at NOAA’s research lab who nominated Kutscher for the award. According to physical scientist 

and Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change member 

Melinda Marquis of NOAA, “Chuck has tirelessly continued to educate experts and lay people about how renewable 

energy can support climate-change mitigation.”

It was through his membership in the American Solar Energy 

Society (ASES) that Kutscher brought the issue of climate 

change to the forefront. “I developed a passion for the climate 

change issue while serving as ASES chair back in 2000 and 

2001,” said Kutscher. “The more I studied the science, the 

more I became convinced that it is a much more serious problem than most Americans realize.” When he chaired the 2006 

National Solar Energy Conference in Denver, he seized the 

opportunity to focus the event on how renewable energy can 

address climate change.

In preparation for that conference, he brought together a crosssection of energy experts—many of them NREL colleagues 

who volunteered their time. This resulted in the publication 

of a 200-page 2007 ASES report, “Tackling Climate Change in 

the U.S.—Potential Carbon Emissions Reductions from Energy 

Efficiency and Renewable Energy by 2030.” The study shows 

that energy efficiency measures can halt the rise in U.S. carbon 

emissions and renewable technologies 

can provide the large cuts that will be 

needed. 

“Energy efficiency and renewable 

energy technologies have tremendous 

capacity to reduce the U.S. carbon 

footprint,” Kutscher said. “Many of 

those technologies are ready now, 

including wind, concentrating solar 

power, photovoltaics, biomass power, 

and geothermal. While continued R&D 

will improve performance and lower 

costs, we can’t afford to wait to deploy 

them.”

The ASES report generated a great deal 

of interest and a number of invitations for Kutscher to speak 

on the potential for renewable energy at conferences around 

“I developed a passion for the 

climate change issue while 

serving as ASES chair back in 2000 

and 2001. The more I studied 

the science, the more I became 

convinced that it is a much 

more serious problem than most 

Americans realize.” – Chuck Kutscher
ENVIRONMENT

41

the country. The Governor’s Energy Office is using a spreadsheet on how efficiency and renewable energy can be implemented in Colorado that he developed with a small volunteer 

task force. Kutscher delivered the keynote address at the first 

Colorado’s New Energy Economy Conference in October 2007. 

Colorado and Kutscher Lead the Change

“In Colorado, we have all the ingredients we need to address climate change. 

We have the foremost renewable energy 

lab in the nation, collaboration between 

universities, and many of the nation’s 

top climate change experts at NOAA 

and NCAR. We also have a very supportive state government, and we are the 

first state in the nation where the voters 

themselves initiated a renewable energy 

portfolio standard. Pull all of these 

people together and we can be national 

leaders in this effort,” Kutscher said.

It is not just the renewable energy world 

that benefits from his passion for clean 

energy. Kutscher also is an adjunct professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder where he teaches a course titled 

“Climate Change Solutions.” He also has supported Melinda 

Marquis’s initiative at NOAA to look at the tie between 

climate science and the integration of renewable energy solutions. They have worked together on a monthly seminar series 

designed to enhance communication between scientists at 

NREL and NOAA, as well as with community members working to deploy renewable energy.

His travels around Colorado have given him a newfound 

appreciation for the breadth of activities taking place. “I’m 

always amazed to see all the things people are doing throughout the state at the grass roots level. They are really working 

hard to deploy all forms of renewable energy. They’ve been 

implementing Colorado’s “New Energy Economy” since 

before we started using that term. Colorado is an exciting 

place to be right now.”

Energized by what the future holds, 

Kutscher has plenty of opportunities 

to be an advocate for tackling climate 

change. He has been invited to speak 

at the upcoming Aspen Environment 

Forum and the Santa Fe Institute’s 

Global Sustainability Summer School 

as well as the State of World Forum 

in Washington, D.C. But, his work is 

foremost on his mind, “I will continue 

to work on applications for concentrating solar power and will continue 

to look for ways that energy efficiency 

and renewable energy can address the 

problem of climate change.”

 — Heather Lammers (Feb. 13, 2009)

“I will continue to work on 

applications for concentrating 

solar power and will continue 

to look for ways that energy 

efficiency and renewable energy 

can address the problem of 

climate change.” – Chuck Kutscher
42

LAB PRESERVES NATURE, HISTORY

Native rabbit brush grows along a hill near NREL’s Science & Technology 

Facility (S&TF). This LEED Platinum building was completed in 2006, 

and is an example of how NREL strives to blend its research and support facilities into the natural environment. Credit: Bill Timmerman/PIX 14963

NREL’s South Table Mountain campus teems with wildlife. 

Its dry landscape is home to more than 200 plant species. 

The site includes cultural gems that speak to the region’s 

past. And, NREL is growing. But growth for the future won’t 

mean changing the nature of the place or ignoring its history. 

NREL staff is keeping a watchful eye to ensure that construction 

has minimal impact on the environment. 

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and NREL are constructing new 218,000 square foot Research Support Facilities (RSF) 

slated to open in the summer of 2010. Other new buildings are 

planned as NREL scientists and engineers work to develop and 

refine renewable energy and energy efficiency technologies. 

Staff always have kept a vigilant eye on the natural resources on 

and around NREL’s campus, and now with the growth—even 

more so. NREL is putting into action its Environmental Management System along with the National Environmental Policy Act 

(NEPA) program to ensure that construction proceeds with the 

lowest possible impact on the environment.

“Protecting the environment is at the heart of NREL’s mission and all of our employees’ daily activities,” Environmental 

Specialist Denise Rayborn said. “We diligently work to protect 

areas near facilities to help preserve Colorado’s natural beauty 

and native ecosystems.”

Preservation for Generations

NREL’s main campus sits on a small portion of land owned by 

DOE near Golden, Colorado. Because the site is largely undeveloped, NREL and DOE have seized the opportunity to safeguard 

numerous species of plants and animals, and even a few pieces 

of history. 

“Our policy continues to be to protect the natural ecosystems in 

the undeveloped areas of our campus,” Senior Environmental 

Scientist Maureen Jordan noted. “Employees here have a passion for environmental stewardship and sustainability—incorporating those concepts at NREL in everything we do.”

In 1999, DOE ensured the preservation of its piece of South Table 

Mountain along with its inhabitants by placing 177 acres under 

a conservation easement. This means that the land will not be 

developed and that habitat and visual panoramas on the mesa 

top will be kept as natural open space. The easement also allows 

public access, with hiking trails managed by the Jefferson County 

Open Space program. The RSF and other future buildings will 

be integrated into the current campus at the base of South Table 

Mountain and will not encroach on the conservation easement. 

“Since I started my hikes in the mid ‘90s, Jefferson County Open 

Space has made significant improvements to the mesa trails, 

adding greatly to the quality of the trail system,” NREL Senior 

Engineer and photography enthusiast Steve Wilcox said. “It’s 

rewarding to see more and more people enjoying the mesa.”

Plants and Animals

The wide-open space outside NREL’s “back door” provides a 

visual feast for employees on their breaks and is home to a wide 

variety of animals and plants. 

“It’s a dry, dusty environment, in sharp contrast with the lush 

foothills just a couple miles to the west. But I love the desert-like 

landscape and never tire of my daily hikes across the mesa surrounded by brush, grasses, cactus, and wildlife,” Wilcox said. “I 

always take my camera with me. It’s always a challenge to find 

something new and interesting to photograph after so many 

years, but nature provides an infinite variation of light, colors, 

contrasts, and subjects.”

One of those subjects might be a herd of mule deer, frequently 

seen grazing outside of NREL’s research buildings. Employees 

also have the pleasure of seeing coyotes, foxes, raccoons, and 

rabbits. Mountain lions occasionally roam the open spaces and 

hikers are always on the look-out for native reptiles including 

rattlesnakes. 

South Table Mountain also provides a temporary home to a 

variety of migratory birds throughout the year. Wildlife surveys 

since 1987 have identified more than 50 species including raptors such as American Kestrels and nesting pairs of red-tailed 

hawks. Preserving open space along South Table Mountain for 

migratory birds is important because many of the birds stopping by are just taking a breather during a trip than can cover 

thousands of miles each year.

The plants on the STM site provide habitat for winged visitors 

and homes for numerous smaller mammals like deer mice and 

prairie voles. The plant life is consistent with what you would 

expect to see in grassland areas. But don’t think it’s “only” grass—

there are nearly 200 species of plants ranging from cactus to wild 

roses to a wide variety of wildflowers (and of course, grasses). 

Echoes from Another Tough Economic Time

In the 1930s, when the economy was at an all-time low and the 

country was mired in the Great Depression, President Franklin 

Roosevelt launched the largest jobs initiative in U.S. history—

the Works Progress Administration (WPA). The NREL campus 

is home to three relics of the WPA, including an amphitheatre 

nestled in the hillside. While no longer open to the public, the 

amphitheatre was once a meeting place for nearby residents.

“At one time people gathered at the amphitheatre on South 

Table Mountain to socialize and watch movies,” Rayborn said. 

“Although our gatherings on the STM site are now business 

rather than social, it’s really neat to see a piece of history and 

know the evolution of our site.”

NREL is serious about caring for these significant cultural resources 

and submitted paperwork to add these sites to the National 

Register of Historic Places in the 1990s. The lab also is interested in 

protecting artifacts that could be discovered in the future. 

— Heather Lammers (March 20, 2009)
FUEL CELLS & HYDROGEN 

43

NREL SCIENTIST FINDS TIME

TO DO IT ALL

In addition to bringing in new research funding, Dinh also

leads and coordinates a team of researchers writing Standard 

Photoelectrochemistry (PEC) Characterization Protocols for

evaluating materials that can extract hydrogen from water

splitting. Credit: Heather Lammers/PIX 16870

I

magine that you walk in to your office on a “normal” work 

day and these are just a few of the items on your to-do list 

(side note: you are doing all of this while preparing for the 

arrival of a new baby boy).

•	 Spearhead a project across five different time zones to come 

up with industry testing standards for photoelectrochemistry (PEC) research

•	 Serve as a project lead for polymer electrolyte membrane 

fuel cell catalyst research

•	 Work as a co-project lead for fuel cell manufacturing 

research and development

•	 Write and send proposals to the U.S. Department of Energy 

to bring millions of dollars to NREL to expand its fuel cell 

research program

•	 Mentor college students working on fuel cell projects.

That’s a day in the life of Huyen Dinh, Ph.D., and a senior 

scientist in NREL’s Hydrogen Technologies & Systems Center.

As insiders at NREL know, the staff at the lab is changing. The 

saying goes, you’ve been here 20 years or two. Dinh is one 

of the fresh faces at NREL. She joined the staff in 2007 after 

working in private industry on fuel cell research and development. But, she found corporate life less than stable and began 

thinking about a move to Colorado when she heard about 

NREL. “I thought, wow! This is the place I want to work,” 

Dinh said. So, she contacted NREL Research Fellow John 

Turner who was also looking to expand the hydrogen fuel

cell program at NREL. 

Growing Fuel Cells

“I convinced management that Huyen would be a strategic 

hire and that she would be beneficial to my PEC research,” 

Turner said. “But more important, her background would 

enable her to bring in funding and help grow a program 

in fuel cells here at NREL—and that’s exactly what has 

occurred.”

To say that Dinh quickly began making an impact at NREL is 

an understatement. In the summer of 2008, Dinh and her colleagues submitted seven proposals to the U.S. Department of 

Energy (DOE) for fuel cell related funding. 

On May 11, 2009, DOE announced that NREL has been 

awarded three fuel cell projects. Dinh is the principal investigator for two of the three. The $2.4 million direct methanol 

fuel cell project will focus on improving catalysts performance 

and lower the cost of fuel cells, which will help accelerate 

micro fuel cell commercialization. In addition to the catalysts 

research, Dinh and NREL’s Bryan Pivovar also won another 

DOE project, which will focus on the effects that system contaminants have on fuel cell performance and durability. The 

DOE award for this project is $6 million.

“We had really high expectations and hoped to win two or 

three new projects. We’re very excited because this means millions of dollars to fund fuel cell research at NREL,” Dinh said.

Making Sense Out of Photoelectrochemistry

Dinh also is showcasing her talents as a project leader. One of 

the things she realized when she first started working on photoelectrochemistry water splitting at NREL was that standardized PEC protocols for hydrogen production did not currently 

exist for researchers. “Standardized testing protocols and efficiency reporting are necessary to screen materials and guide 

research towards the most promising PEC materials,” said 

Dinh. “I saw a need, so being new and naïve, I volunteered.”

PEC is the direct conversion of the sun’s energy into electrical 

energy, which is used to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. 

A PEC system combines the harvesting of solar energy and 

the electrolysis of water into a single device. For the process to 

work, the semiconductor must meet several key criteria simultaneously. “PEC water-splitting is a promising approach to 

solar-to-hydrogen production,” Dinh said. “But standardized 

testing and screening is essential to have successful research 

and development.”

Dinh’s working group is taking collaborative leadership to 

a whole new level. In May 2008, she began working with 

colleagues from five different time zones scattered across 

the globe including: Stanford University, the Hawaii Natural Energy Institute, University of California Santa Barbara, 

University of Louisville, University of Tokyo, the Department 

of Energy and the Australian Nuclear Science & Technology 
44

Organization. Since July 2008, the team has met weekly via 

Webcast and teleconference. Each member of the group agreed 

to write a series of documents for a final paper to be submitted 

to a peer reviewed journal for publication. 

So far, the group has produced 18 different documents and 

has identified the top 10 experiments for characterizing and 

screening PEC materials relatively 

quickly to make informed decisions 

about a PEC material. They also have 

drafted the first PEC characterization 

flow chart to show the recommended 

sequence of experiments and decisions points.

With a deadline looming for submitting their final paper, Dinh said the 

group is taking it all in stride, “The 

team works very well together and 

everyone is eager and very committed to the project. We know we have 

an international audience waiting 

and wanting to know when it will be ready.”

Dinh already is being recognized for her efforts in the PEC 

standardization. She has received letters of appreciation from 

DOE and she has earned a President’s Award from the Alliance for Sustainable Energy, LLC.

The inside of a polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cell in NREL’s 

fuel cell lab; Dinh, a co-project lead for an NREL team working 

to improve the cost, performance and durability of these types of 

fuel cells. A fuel cell is electrochemical and continuously converts 

the chemical energy of an externally supplied fuel (like hydrogen 

or methanol) and oxygen from the air directly to electrical energy. 

Producing energy this way is two to three times more efficient than 

an internal combustion engine. PEC provides a renewable source of 

hydrogen for applications like fuel cells.

Credit: Heather Lammers/PIX 16871

Past Challenges Keep Her Motivated

While the PEC project alone would keep many of us working 

late nights, for Dinh, it’s just one of a variety of projects she’s 

excited about. The obvious question is, how does she stay so 

inspired? “I’ve been very motivated to do well in school and 

in life because my mom had to work so hard to support us,” 

Dinh said. Her mom, in fact, had to 

battle extraordinary circumstances

to see that her children had the 

opportunities that many of us take

for granted. 

Dinh was born in Vietnam and her 

family fled the country in 1979 among 

the millions of Vietnamese boat 

people seeking refuge from the communist government. Dinh’s journey 

took her, along with her mother and 

sisters, onto a small boat crowded 

with several hundred people. Crossing the open ocean, their boat at one 

point was chased by pirates. Sick and 

exhausted, they eventually made their way to Malaysia where 

authorities tried to keep them from landing, but their mother 

pulled Dinh and her siblings from the boat and made it to 

shore. They lived on the beach for a number of weeks before 

moving to a refugee camp. It was months later before they 

were able to secure passage to Canada and reunite with their 

father.

The events from her past motivated her to excel at school, 

work, and beyond. Dinh attended college and did her graduate work at the University of Calgary in Canada. She finished 

her post doctoral work at Los Alamos National Laboratory 

in 2000. But it’s Colorado where she now sees her future. “I 

love the people, it’s an active place, it’s a good place to raise a 

family—this is where I want to settle.”

NREL also has on the drawing board a new research building, 

the Energy Systems Integration Facility (ESIF). When completed, the ESIF will house a variety of research programs and 

plans call for three new fuel cell labs to be included. Part of the 

reason Dinh works so hard and is passionate about her chosen 

field is the future she believes it brings, “Hydrogen fuel cell 

technology is not only good for the environment, but it will 

help our country progress as well.”

And, Dinh hopes that all of these programs will bring an 

opportunity for her to work with students pursuing their 

graduate education or doing their post doctoral research, like 

she did at Los Alamos National Laboratory. “I love working 

with students, one of the reasons I came to NREL is because 

it’s a nice cross between academia and industry.”

“I think about our children, and their future, and that’s very 

motivating for me. At NREL, it’s great to be able to work with 

people who have the same motivation and want to do their 

part toward a great mission.”

— Heather Lammers (May 15, 2009)

“I think about our children, 

and their future, and that’s very 

motivating for me. At NREL, it’s 

great to be able to work with people 

who have the same motivation

and want to do their part toward

a great mission.” – Huyen Dinh
FUEL CELLS & HYDROGEN 

45

ECO-FRIENDLY SUV GETS A 

HYDROGEN MILEAGE BOOST

The 11-hour trek to independently verify the Highlander’s fuel 

economy began at 8 a.m. during the peak of southern California’s 

morning rush hour. To mimic a typical commuter’s drive, the route 

included high-speed highway driving, moderate highway driving, 

and stop-and-go traffic. Credit: Keith Wipke/PIX 16856

When researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy’s 

(DOE) National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) 

and Savannah River National Laboratory (SRNL) 

participated in a test drive for a hydrogen fuel cell SUV that 

reached the equivalent of a 431-mile driving range, it wasn’t 

just California dream. The research team, along with Toyota, 

recently completed a 331-mile round trip drive between Torrance and San Diego, California, driving two Toyota Highlander Fuel Cell Hybrid Vehicles – Advanced (FCHV-adv). 

And, with the fuel remaining in the tanks, those SUVs easily 

could have crossed the 400 mile mark.

Toyota Motor Engineering & Manufacturing North America, 

Inc., along with NREL/SRNL entered into a cooperative 

research and development agreement (CRADA) with the sole 

objective to determine the real-world driving range of the 

FCHV-adv. 

“The main thing was the driving range of the vehicles,” said 

Keith Wipke, NREL senior engineer and group manager for 

Hydrogen Analysis. “We were basically showing that using 

today’s technologies, you can achieve above 400 miles, or 

more, of real-world driving using a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle. 

It was exciting and surprising to see such high fuel economy 

for an SUV.”

Although hybrids like the Toyota Prius currently get lots of 

press for helping Americans use less oil, hydrogen also holds 

great promise. NREL and SRNL researchers verified that the 

two FCHV-advs used during the driving test achieved an 

estimated range of 431 miles on a single fill-up of compressed 

hydrogen gas. The average fuel economy came out to the 

equivalent of 68.3 miles/kilogram of hydrogen (equivalent to 

mpg for gasoline-powered cars). And, the only “exhaust” from 

these eco-friendly vehicles is H2O (water).

A California Rush and then Coast

The day before the big ride, researchers visited Toyota’s headquarters to watch the Highlanders being fueled up. The next 

morning saw the start of an 11-hour trek to verify the Highlander’s driving range and efficiency. The evaluation began at 

8 a.m., during the peak of California’s morning rush hour. 

Crews started the trip at Toyota’s headquarters in Torrance, 

which is just south of Los Angeles. Each vehicle had one 

driver from the vehicle manufacturer, a scientist from NREL 

or SRNL, and equipment to log data along the way. Drivers 

headed north then west to Santa Monica, and down along the 

coast to Redondo Beach for the first rest stop. The next leg 

went from Redondo Beach to Dana Point, and the final leg 

went from Dana Point south all the way to San Diego. They 

took the same route back after lunch. 

“Because of the California traffic, which was heavy for much 

of the time in the morning and evening, the trip took longer 

than originally planned,” Wipke said. “But the situation definitely matched the real world evaluation we were after, with a 

mixture of driving conditions.”

To mimic a typical commuter’s drive, the route included 

highway driving and stop-and-go traffic. The maximum speed 

during the test route reached approximately 75 mph with an 

average speed for day that was approximately 30 mph. The 

actual range for the vehicles was calculated by using the 331.5 

miles covered during 11 hours driving, plus 99.5 miles of additional range calculated from the average fuel economy from 

the day multiplied by the remaining usable hydrogen. Driving 

range results were independently calculated for each vehicle, 

and these results averaged together to achieve the final 431-

mile range estimate. 

Although the idea of using hydrogen as fuel for your SUV 

or car may conjure up worries of the Hindenburg, today’s 

hydrogen fuel cell vehicles are safe. The tanks used to store 

the hydrogen are well constructed and the fueling stations are 

easy to use and similar in design to modern gas stations. 

In fact, one characteristic of hydrogen actually makes it safer 

to use than gasoline. “Hydrogen can be safer than gasoline 

because it is significantly lighter than air,” Wipke said. “In the 

rare event that you do have a leak in your tank, the hydrogen 

will disperse quickly and not pool on the ground around a 

vehicle as gasoline does.”

Data Collection Showed Early Promise

To verify how far these hydrogen fuel cell vehicles could go, 

data collection systems installed in the SUVs tracked vehicle 

speed, distance, hydrogen used, hydrogen tank pressure, temperature, and internal tank volume. 

NREL and SRNL analyzed all data gathered during the evaluation and prepared a formal report for DOE verifying range 
46

results and estimated miles per gallon. Wipke and the crew 

were able to see exciting initial results during the evaluation. 

“We were able to see the data displays in the vehicles as we 

drove. It was really neat to see the data play out in live action, 

and it gave us a strong indication 

that the range would be high right 

from the start,” Wipke said. 

The teaming of Toyota and NREL 

for this type of evaluation is a 

natural match. “The analysis will 

help regulators and government 

research programs accurately 

assess the status of the fuel cell 

industry and viability of the current technology,” Toyota Technical 

Center Advanced Power Train 

Engineer Jared Farnsworth said.

NREL has six years experience 

working with automotive companies and their fuel providers to evaluate the on-road performance of hydrogen fuel cell vehicles as well as the needed 

refueling infrastructure through DOE’s Learning Demonstration. The Learning Demonstration encompasses 140 fuel cell 

vehicles and more than 20 refueling stations and has accumulated more than 2 million miles traveled.

NREL’s work evaluating fuel cell vehicles got a boost recently with 

an on-site hydrogen fueling station. Colorado blue skies and light 

winds (two key components in making fuel for the station) made 

an appearance at a recent ribbon cutting event along with NREL’s 

Deputy Lab Director for Science & Technology Robert McGrath, Technology Validation Task Leader Keith Wipke, Associate Lab Director, 

Renewable Fuels & Vehicle Systems Dale Gardner, and PI for Windto-Hydrogen Station Kevin Harrison. 

Credit: Keith Wipke/PIX 16899

NREL Makes its Own Fuel

Although NREL researchers didn’t get to bring the FCHV-adv 

back to the lab for further testing, they did come home to the 

commissioning of a new Hydrogen Fueling Station that can fill 

hydrogen fuel cell vehicles being tested 

at NREL.

The new station is part of NREL and 

Xcel Energy’s Wind-to-Hydrogen 

(Wind2H2) project. Wind2H2 uses 

wind and solar energy to generate electricity. That electricity is then used to 

split water into hydrogen and oxygen. 

The hydrogen is compressed, stored 

in large steel tanks and later converted 

back to electricity or dispensed into fuel 

cell cars or used to generate electricity 

using a 50 kilowatt internal combustion generator. A 5 kW fuel cell will 

be installed later in 2010 that will be 

integrated with wind and solar sources for testing of hybrid 

power systems. 

“Since our project uses wind and solar electricity directly from 

the sources—without sending it out to the utility grid first—

our hydrogen is some of the ‘greenest’ in the world,” NREL 

Senior Engineer Kevin Harrison said. 

Because the station is part of a larger Wind2H2 research 

project, the hydrogen created isn’t used solely to fuel hydrogen cell vehicles. However, NREL is interested in partnering 

with companies and agencies that may be placing hydrogen 

vehicles in their fleet in the future and need a place northwest 

of Denver to fill-up. With a large concrete pad and lots of wind 

and sun at the site, the station can even accommodate hydrogen buses up to 40 feet in length. To accommodate bus fueling, 

new high-pressure tanks will be installed at the Wind2H2 site 

during the spring of 2010.

— Heather Lammers (Nov. 13, 2009)

“We were basically showing that 

using today’s technologies, you can 

achieve above 400 miles, or more, of 

real-world driving using a hydrogen 

fuel cell vehicle. It was exciting and 

surprising to see such high fuel 

economy for an SUV.” – Keith Wipke
LABORATORY OF THE FUTURE 

47

NREL TESTS ENERGY-SAVING

OFFICE OF THE FUTURE

Collaboration between NREL employees like Rick Horner and John 

Williams has been enhanced by the new workstations. Storage 

bins with rollers and padded tops become guest chairs for quick 

meetings and team conversations. Credit: Heather Lammers/PIX 16864

Making sure that the new Research Support Facilities 

(RSF) will achieve Platinum level certification from

the U.S. Green Buildings Council Leadership in Energy 

and Environmental Design (LEED®) takes not only planning, 

but practice. 

NREL planners have set their sights on achieving a LEED 

Platinum rating for the RSF, which means the building will:

•	 Meet the needs of the workforce—both current and future

•	 Maximize the efficiency of the employee workspaces

•	 Make the best use of the space while using the lowest

attainable amount of energy per square foot.

Reaching these goals will not be easy in a building as large as 

the RSF, which is planned to be a 218,000 square-foot facility 

supporting nearly 740 staff, along with an energy efficient 

information technology data center. As a result, tearing down 

walls is an important concept in the RSF, both literally and 

figuratively.

The most dramatic change from a traditional office to NREL’s 

office of the future can be seen in employee work areas. 

Frontline staff and supervisors will work in open air cubicles. 

Workstation panels are only 42 inches high and bookshelves 

between workstations top out at 54 inches. Management level 

cubicles do have privacy walls that are 6-feet tall with doors; 

however, most of the ceilings at the RSF will be 13-feet high.

Taking the Space for a Test Drive

Staff from NREL’s Information Services (IS) office volunteered 

to prototype the new office designs, furniture, and technology, 

and moved in November 2008.

“People see these work stations and, initially, are concerned 

about the noise factor,” said Client Services Group Manager 

Henri Hubenka. “But, what we’ve found is that the new 

workspaces are very conducive to collaboration between 

teammates.”

The low cubicle walls are vital energy savers allowing for 

circulation of both air and light. Background office chatter is 

mitigated through white noise, which is incorporated into the 

building to help mute conversations. Employees who need 

privacy can use “huddle rooms,” small conference rooms set 

aside for teams who want to have conversations in a quiet 

space. Other design and technology features the RSF will 

incorporate include:

•	 Daylighting along with overhead lights that automatically 

turn on or off

•	 Globally regulated temperatures throughout the building

•	 A reduction in stand-alone machines such as printers, faxes, 

copiers, and refrigerators; in the prototyped office being 

tested by IS, 68 staffers on one floor reduced their use of 

standalones from 50 machines to 10.

Computers Go Back to the Future

NREL is also looking to phase out standalone CPUs at 

each workstation and utilize either laptops or “thin client” 

machines, which are basically a monitor, keyboard, and 

mouse. All software programs needed by thin client users are 

housed on a central mainframe—like the terminal days of the 

‘80s. The energy savings of a laptop over a standard PC is 85% 

and using thin client machines brings the energy savings up to 

92% per workstation.

While it’s cool to move into a new office with sleek furnishings 

and the latest technology, one thing that will make or break 

the transition to an office of the future is communication.

“Start early,” advises Hubenka. “Let employees know how 

things will work and what the differences are between a regular office and a super-efficient office.”

Upon hearing about the drastic workstation changes, Hubenka 

estimates that up to 80% of the IS staff had some trepidation. 

But constant communication, a Web site dedicated to the new 

office, and constant requests for feedback have lowered that 

estimate to less than 10%.

IS Group Manager Mary Donahue agrees with Hubenka, “I 

like it, it’s a great space and it is very comfortable to work in.”

The RSF is slated to open the summer of 2010. When some of 

NREL’s workforce moves into the new building, the employees at the prototyped “office of the future” will be able to 

acquaint their colleagues with the energy efficient

workspaces and technologies that will be in place.

“All of these updates to how we work are going to get NREL 

where we need to be now and in the future,” said Hubenka.

— Heather Lammers (March 13, 2009)
48

RECOVERY ACT MONEY

INVESTED AT NREL

NREL senior scientist Howard Brantz explains his thin-film

silicon PV research to U.S. Department of Energy Secretary

Steven Chu (center) and Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter (left).

Chu and Ritter visited NREL’s Process Development Integration

Laboratory during an April 29th visit. Credit: Jim Yost/PIX 16284

U.S. Department of Energy Secretary Steven Chu made 

his first visit to NREL as secretary an especially memorable one—announcing $110 million in funding under the 

American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

More than $100 million will accelerate construction of the laboratory’s Golden, Colorado, campus, dramatically expanding 

NREL’s capacity for renewable energy research and partnerships while showcasing some of the world’s most energy 

efficient buildings.

An additional $10 million has been designated for improvements at the laboratory’s National Wind Technology Center 

near Boulder.

“These investments are an unmistakable signal from DOE 

about the laboratory’s central role in advancing President 

Obama’s clean energy agenda,” NREL Director Dan Arvizu 

said. “It is a significant investment in NREL’s future.”

Secretary Outlines Energy Efforts

Secretary Chu announced the new funding in an hour-long presentation to laboratory staff and elected officials. He outlined 

the administration’s efforts in its first 100 days to streamline 

DOE procedures and loan approval for $26 billion authorized 

for clean energy projects nationwide since mid-February to 

create green jobs and promote economic recovery.

And, he reiterated the administration’s goal of doubling the 

percentage that renewable energy contributes to the nation’s 

electricity supply by 2012—from 5–10%.

“The goal is to set America on a course for a secure and sustainable energy future,” Chu said.

At the same time, Secretary Chu said, a new generation of 

renewable energy technologies must be developed to stem 

potentially devastating climate changes driven largely by 

carbon emissions generated by fossil energy consumption.

New, Transformative Technologies Are Key

Chu outlined the hurdles in several categories where the 

laboratory already performs critical research, including efficient 

building design, solar energy and improved energy storage for 

both personal vehicles and utility-scale power systems.

“It’s a start,” Chu said of the new investments. “By 2050 we 

need to reduce carbon emissions by 80% or more. To reach that 

goal we will need transformative new technologies.”

The announcement was part of a half-day tour of NREL by the 

Secretary and Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter. With Director Arvizu, 

they spent 45 minutes touring the Process Development Integration Laboratory, NREL’s unique collaborative facility where 

industry works directly with researchers to rapidly turn solar 

photovoltaic innovations into commercial products.

Over lunch, the Secretary was privately briefed by NREL executives and senior researchers on some of the laboratory’s basic 

research into solar physics and advanced programs for future 

electricity and fuel technologies.

Details of Recovery Act Funding

The Recovery Act funding to the laboratory includes:

•	 $68 million to complete the Research Support Facilities (RSF) 

that are currently under construction, including a second phase 

known as RSF II. With completion scheduled in 2010, the 218,000 

square foot complex will be the nation’s most energy-efficient 

office building and a showcase of integrated, high-performance 

design, achieving LEED platinum certification, and reducing 

energy use by 50% over standard commercial office buildings.

•	 $19.2 million for renewable energy systems and energy 

efficiency improvements to the campus, including additional 

onsite solar arrays and the potential addition of geothermal 

and fuel cell power sources. This investment allows the 

laboratory to replace conventional power purchased from 

utilities, reduce the purchase of renewable energy credits, 

and lower the laboratory’s carbon footprint.

•	 $13.5 million to expand and improve the Integrated Biorefinery Research Facility. The new funding will expand NREL’s 

biomass-to-ethanol research capabilities at the current Alternative Fuels User Facility by allowing the laboratory to work 

simultaneously on multiple projects with multiple partners. 

The IBRF will accelerate methods to produce cellulosic 

ethanol on a commercial scale that is cost-competitive with 

petroleum-based fuels and reduce U.S. gasoline use.

•	 $10 million for improvements at the National Wind Technology Center (NWTC), including doubling the capacity of the 

existing dynamometer to 5 MW to test the performance and 

reliability of the latest generation of large wind turbine drive 

trains. By producing variable speeds and torque levels, the 

dynamometer simulates extreme winds and other performance conditions and compresses 30 years of turbine use into 

a few months of endurance testing. The funding also pays for 

improvements to the NWTC’s electrical distribution systems 

so that electricity generated by new utility-scale wind turbines tested at the center can be captured to power the center 

itself and even exported to local utilities.

— Joseph B. Verrengia (May 1, 2009)
LABORATORY OF THE FUTURE 

49

LABYRINTH TO STORE ENERGY

IN BASEMENT FOR LATER USE

NREL Construction Manager Carl Cox, and Shawn Bradfield with 

NREL Construction Safety, discuss an upcoming cement pour that 

will lay the floor of the labyrinth. The staggered walls behind 

them force air flowing through the basement of the RSF to cool 

and heat the concrete. Credit: Heather Lammers/PIX 16874

T

here’s a labyrinth in the basement of NREL’s newest 

building. The maze wasn’t designed to hem in a mythical 

beast or to confuse workers, but it is a trap—one that will 

capture the heat of the day or the cool of the night, hold onto 

it, and then slowly release the thermal energy to help warm or 

cool the building.

The Research Support Facilities now under construction on 

the U.S. Department of Energy’s NREL campus will include 

two long wings, connected at the middle by a lobby and 

conference area. Each wing will rest on a low basement with 

concrete walls staggered to make the air take S-turns through 

the space, lingering awhile, losing its cool or—depending on 

the season—its heat.

“As the air goes through the maze, there’s greater contact 

with the mass, thousands of tons of concrete,” said NREL’s 

Eric Telesmanich, project manager for the Research Support 

Facilities.

That way, the labyrinth acts as a thermal battery, storing the 

chill of the night air to reduce the building’s cooling load in 

summer. In winter, the labyrinth will store heat drawn from 

the computers in the new data center and outside air warmed 

by the sun beating down on a transpired air collector.

Waste Heat Won’t Go Wasted

As the waste heat from the computer center and the air 

warmed by the sun wends through the staggered concrete 

walls of the labyrinth, pulled by fans, the slabs absorb the 

warmth. The next day, the stored heat can knock off some of 

the morning’s chill, when fresh air is pulled through the labyrinth before being heated and pumped into offices. The heat 

the computers shed also will be used to heat the building.

The transpired air collector—a metal sheet with tiny strategically placed holes to pull air through—takes advantage of 

what comes naturally on a cold Colorado day. 

“The air might be pretty nippy,” said Phil Macey, a senior 

associate at RNL, the design firm for the RSF. “But when you 

stand in the sun, there’s lots of warmth.”

NREL’s Telesmanich said that the building’s original design 

called for two walls—or a double skin—on the south side to 

preheat air. But that raised a lot of technical, cost and maintenance challenges. RNL went looking for a different solution, 

and came up with the transpired air collector, a concept NREL 

won an award for in 1994. 

“So, a technology developed at NREL turned out to be the 

perfect solution for NREL’s new building,” Telesmanich said.

Pulling outside air through the labyrinth can warm it 5 to 10 

degrees before it is further heated to warm the building. “That 

may not sound like much,” Macey said, “but it is meaningful 

across the whole year.”

Old Idea Brought Up To Date

The air flowing into the labyrinths starts two stories up and 

travels down ventilation shafts built into the RSF’s stairwells. 

The labyrinth in the north wing of the office building will be 

for heating; the south wing labyrinth will help with both heating and cooling.

Storing heat or cool in a large dense mass isn’t a new idea. 

Think of how refreshingly cool you feel walking into an adobe 

church or a gothic cathedral. Large masses absorb the heat of 

the day, slowly releasing it at night to keep the space warm. 

The reverse happens when the thermal mass has cooled and 

the outside temperatures begin to warm.

How can this effect be used to help save the energy it takes 

to heat or cool and office building? In the 1970s, drawing 

air across a bed of stones was considered. But, Macey said, 

because of the irregularity of stone sizes and shapes and the 

difficulty of controlling air flow through the rocks, the idea 

turned out to be impractical. 

Poetry From a Challenge

His firm and engineering consultant Stantec revisited the idea 

because of Colorado’s clay soils and climate. Here, builders 

need to remove the clay soil before building a foundation 

to prevent expansion and shifting. Often, a basement is the 

solution. But in buildings where a basement is not called for, 

typically the clay soil is taken away and replaced by better soil 

that then is compacted. This can be expensive. 

And, the RSF doesn’t need a basement. On the contrary, the 

building’s design called for letting in as much light as practical.

The solution was to make a shallow basement that, for a small 

investment, could be used as a thermal mass to help reduce 

the energy used for heating and cooling the building.

It was an idea that “made poetry out of a challenge,”

Macey said. 
50

Figuring out what to build was another challenge. Macey said 

that Stantec spent a few weeks writing a unique computer 

program to optimize the size and shape of the labyrinths 

and to calculate air flow. But that work can be used by others 

working on similar projects in the future, since the experience 

of the RSF will be shared to help design and construct other 

highly efficient buildings.

This computer rendering shows the Research Support Facilities main 

entrance facing west, along with the three-story south wing (left) 

and the four-story north wing (right). Courtesy of RNL/PIX 16250

Energy Requirements Drive Design

The RSF will use about one half to one-third the amount of 

energy as other office buildings, and could be one of the most 

energy-efficient office buildings in the world, Telesmanich said. 

“The energy requirements drove the design of the building,” 

he said. “That’s a very different way of doing things.”

Macey agrees. “We’ve learned how powerful climate is. 

Mother Nature gets a powerful vote. So, we let the energy of 

the environment drive the design and think of ways to finesse 

nature rather than challenge it.” 

Haselden Construction is building the 218,000 square-foot 

Research Support Facilities building, which is designed to be a 

model for sustainable, high-performance building design, and 

will provide DOE-owned work space for administrative staff 

who currently occupy leased space in the nearby Denver West 

Office Park. The RSF is planned achieve a LEED® (Leadership 

in Environmental and Energy Design) Platinum designation—

the highest benchmark awarded by the U.S. Green Building 

Council. Construction on the RSF is expected to be completed 

in summer 2010.

— George Douglas (May 29, 2009)
LABORATORY OF THE FUTURE 

51

RECYCLED NATURAL GAS PIPES 

SHORE UP GREEN BUILDING

The rounded natural gas pipe will be visible in some areas of the 

RSF serving as a unique architectural feature. Credit: Pat Corkory/PIX 16440

B

uilding a support structure of something, tried, true, and 

tested like “off-the-shelf” steel is standard practice in building construction. NREL’s effort to create the most energy 

efficient and “green” office building is putting a twist on an old 

standard. The columns that will carry the weight of floors and 

walls in the new Research Support Facilities (RSF) are actually 

castoffs from the natural gas industry—recycled pipe.

“It’s a perfect circle,” said Philip Macey, project manager for 

RNL, the design firm for the RSF. “There’s such elegance in this 

building in the fact that ‘old’ energy is providing the support for 

NREL’s new building where new energies will be developed.”

The RSF is under construction at NREL’s South Table Mountain 

Campus near Golden, Colorado. It was designed to achieve 

LEED Platinum status from the U.S. Green Building Council 

and its energy saving features will be shared with, and hopefully replicated by, commercial builders across the country.

“Early in the design process, the team chose to use reclaimed 

natural gas pipe in an effort to utilize a reclaimed product in 

the building for the purpose of LEED as well as demonstrating 

the use of a reclaimed product that is available to anyone,” said 

Derek Oliver, Haselden Construction’s pre-construction manager.

The steel natural gas pipe used in the RSF was purchased 

from a company that specializes in salvaging gas piping that 

has been removed from service. Typically, pipes sold by these 

salvage retailers come from fields in Texas or Louisiana, in this 

case, the RSF gas pipe was never used and was sold by the 

owners to the reclamation yard.

“There are steel stockpiles like this around the country, but

you have to go hunting to get the right sizes and quantities,” 

Macey said.

Unique Feature Required a Plan B

Using recycled steel, while a boon for the environment, it can 

leave builders at the mercy of what’s available when shopping 

for recycled steel versus what is actually available when you are 

ready to buy and build.

In case the natural gas pipe wasn’t available for the RSF, the 

architects also drew up the building with traditional steel. For 

a while, it looked like Plan B would have to be implemented. 

However, a week before it was needed, Haselden found enough 

recycled gas pipe to complete the building as designed, which 

greatly pleased the contractors.

“We feel we need to task ourselves with seeking recycled 

materials first,” Macey said. “As a culture, we need to not make 

‘new’ the first choice because there is an urgent need to reduce 

energy consumption and our carbon footprint.”

Steel Stays Strong, Doesn’t Go Bad

Recycled steel is a win-win for builders because of its green 

factor and because it can be purchased at a very competitive 

price. “Recycled steel doesn’t go bad,” said Macey. “You simply 

can clear the rust off and it’s a big resource worldwide.”

Once the team found the reclaimed pipe they envisioned for the 

project, they went extra lengths to make sure it would provide 

the support needed for an office building such as the RSF.

“Structural tests were performed on samples of the desired pipe 

to ensure that the material would meet the structural requirements of the building,” Oliver said.

While the recycled natural gas pipes used in the RSF passed the 

required strength and welding tests, the design team went the 

extra step to reinforce the pipe at the lower levels.

“We are filling the bottom two to three floors with concrete to 

help carry the building loads,” said NREL Senior Construction 

Manager Carl Cox. However, the steel tubes which average 33 

feet in height are still hollow in the upper floors of the building 

and serve as a unique architectural feature in the office space.

“The end result of using reclaimed gas pipe for the RSF is a high 

quality, architecturally appealing product that helped reach the 

LEED Platinum requirement for the project,” Oliver added.

Natural Beauty Shines Through

The natural gas pipes will be seen from the interior as columns 

in various areas of the RSF. To preserve this rare architectural 

feature, the pipes will be coated with a clear, environmentally 

safe finish typically used inside of ships to coat ballast tanks. The 

coating can be used in interior spaces (like an office) and meets 

EPA requirements for an environmentally sensitive product.

“We wanted to display the material in an honest way,” Macey 

noted. “And, getting round columns in a building is a bit of a 

dream. Out of 100 buildings, only one other would have honest 

round steel columns.” 

Honesty in materials is a theme throughout construction; other 

interior elements such as Colorado beetle kill wood paneling 

and pre-cast, insulated wall panels using recycled materials will 

continue the theme of reuse in the RSF. 

“There are a lot of recycled and regionally available materials for 

use in buildings,” Macey said. “Once people understand this, 

they will be surprised at how easy it is to make these choices.”

Haselden Construction and RNL are building the 218,000 

square-foot RSF, which is designed to be a model for sustainable, high-performance building design, and will provide 

Department of Energy-owned work space for administrative 

staff who currently occupy leased space in the nearby Denver 

West Office Park. The RSF is planned to achieve a LEED® (Leadership in Environmental and Energy Design) Platinum designation—the highest benchmark awarded by the U.S. Green 

Building Council. Construction on the RSF is expected to be 

completed in summer 2010.

— Heather Lammers (July 17, 2009)
52

BUILDING PANELS PROTECT, 

PROVIDE COMFORT

NREL Senior Construction Manager Carl Cox examines panels 

installed on the RSF, which benefit the building on many levels. 

The exterior keeps the weather out and helps regulate interior

temperatures. The middle section provides insulation and the

opposite side serves as the interior wall. Credit: Pat Corkery/PIX 16763

Walking into a building constructed before the days of 

heating systems and air conditioning, such as a southwestern adobe, still elicits a sense of comfort and coziness. The concept of using thermal mass in walls to help maintain the temperature of a building is not new. And now, this 

tried and true method is being used to regulate comfort systems 

of NREL’s Research Support Facilities (RSF), one of the most 

energy efficient buildings in the world.

“In this case, the exterior skin of the building is doing more than 

just keeping the weather out,” Philip Macey, project manager for 

RNL, the design firm for the RSF, said. “Precast panels installed 

as the walls are actually part of the heating and cooling system 

for the building.

“All of these ideas are based on principles that have been really 

tried and tested,” Macey said. “They just haven’t been used in 

an office building in modern times—till now.”

The RSF is under construction at NREL’s South Table Mountain 

Campus near Golden, Colorado, and is designed with a myriad 

of energy saving features, such as the precast exterior panels, 

which play a lead role in maintaining the temperature of the 

building’s interior spaces. These energy efficient practices will 

be shared with, and, it’s hoped, replicated by commercial builders across the country.

It’s Cool and Quiet... Too Quiet?

Another advanced feature in the RSF is how the windows also 

help regulate the inside temperatures. During warmer summer 

nights, the windows will automatically open to vent excess heat 

and allow the cool night air to naturally bring down the temperatures inside the office space. As the night progresses, the six inches 

of interior exposed concrete in the pre-cast panels of the RSF will 

lose their heat, cool down, and the process begins anew the next 

day. It’s the same thing that happens in brick homes,” Macey said. 

“During the day it’s comfortable inside but if you don’t open the 

windows at night, suddenly it can be 80° inside and you wonder 

how that happened.” To help augment this system during warmer 

summer days, the building also has an underground concrete 

labyrinth that can store cool night air for later use.

So, unlike most commercial office buildings, the new RSF doesn’t 

rely on a traditional forced air HVAC system and uses much

more outside air inside the building. According to NREL’s Project 

Manager, Eric Telesmanich, this is possible because 95% of the 

work spaces don’t have ceilings. Employees will assist the natural 

ventilation flow by opening and closing windows as necessary. 

They will also have the ability to control the amount of ventilation delivered to their work space through an under floor air 

distribution system when the natural ventilation is not enough. 

In fact, the lack of a traditional forced-air system throughout 

most of the building means that it will be very quiet. Without 

the constant sound of moving air, the building will employ 

white noise to help mitigate background chatter that will take 

place in such an open office. 

“What a great environment this will be for the employees,” 

Erick Hartzell, RSF project manager for Haselden Construction 

said. “It’s going to be the best possible environment to spend an 

eight to 10 hour day.”

“Thermal comfort studies show that the most comfortable 

spaces are the ones that don’t have drafts that push the air to 

control the temperature,” Macey said. “Everything in the RSF 

will take on that even temperature.”

Panels Play on Both Sides

Environment also is a concern when it comes to the materials 

used in constructing the RSF. This includes the precast panels, 

which were fabricated in Denver. All of the concrete and 

aggregate used to make the panels is also from local sources 

within Colorado. Although the panels come in various sizes and 

shapes, on average, they measure 13 x 30 feet. Two hundred and 

eight have been installed on the RSF.

The panels did present a challenge to the Haselden crews during 

installation. Workers had to be very careful when lifting the large 

panels into place because unlike typical siding on buildings, these 

panels make up the entire wall of the building, both exterior and 

interior. “The panels are the finished wall on the inside as well as 

the outside,” Hartzell said. “We’ve had to be very careful installing them because there is a huge finished surface that will show 

any blemishes. In addition, the whole thermal component of 

these walls was important during installation. You can’t just put 

an anchor bolt anywhere you want into the wall, you have to be 

aware of how it will affect the heat loss for the building.”

The interior walls will receive the typical coats of paint and 

primer, but the underneath surface is what will show through to 

the occupants. Colors also will be carefully selected with many of 

the precast walls being painted white to help with day lighting the 

interior work space. And, since the windows play a role in lighting and cooling the building, they are plentiful. “No one will be 

farther than 30 feet from a window in the RSF,” Macey said. “The 

scale of the windows and the connection they bring to the outside 

environment is something I think people will notice most.”

Haselden Construction and RNL are building the 218,000 squarefoot RSF building, which is designed to be a model for sustainable, 

high-performance building design, and will provide U.S. Department of Energy-owned work space for administrative staff who 

currently occupy leased space in the nearby Denver West Office 

Park. The RSF is planned to achieve a LEED® (Leadership in Environmental and Energy Design) Platinum designation—the highest 

benchmark awarded by the U.S. Green Building Council. Construction on the RSF is expected to be completed in summer 2010.

— Heather Lammers (Oct. 30, 2009)
LABORATORY OF THE FUTURE 

53

NREL SETS THE BAR FOR OFFICE 

BUILDING ENERGY USE

Designers met NREL’s aggressive energy use requirement for the 

Research Support Facilities by taking advantage Colorado’s sunny 

climate. Large windows for daylighting and thermally sophisticated wall systems for solar heating are crucial to the net-zero 

energy design. Credit: Pat Corkery/PIX 16768

T

echnology—from sophisticated computer modeling to 

advanced windows that actually open!—will help the newest building at the U.S. Department of Energy’s National 

Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) be one of the world’s 

most energy efficient offices.

But making NREL’s new Research Support Facilities (RSF) into a showcase for 

engineering net-zero energy office design 

didn’t begin with rooftop solar panels 

on its distinctive “lazy-H” shape, or a 

subterranean “thermal labyrinth” that 

mimics a cave to help heat and cool the 

building—although the RSF will, in fact, 

use both sustainable strategies.

Nor did it start with aggressive window 

shading and advanced light reflecting devices to simultaneously provide daylighting and passive heating—although 

both systems are vital to the building’s performance.

The RSF’s origins as an intended symbol of energy efficiency 

goes back more than a decade to when DOE proposed an 

administrative facility setting the national standard for energy 

efficiency and can be traced in the project’s exhaustive specifications document to a single number in section 8. 2 on page 10:

“...25 kBtu/sf/year...”

How little energy is 25,000 Btu per square foot per year? 

By comparison, conventional office buildings built over the 

past 30 years typically use three times more energy than 

required in the RSF. That’s like taking a 1980s-era family sedan 

and demanding that it get 60 mpg.

It’s even aggressive by new construction standards. The NREL 

requirement is 50% more energy efficient than the new commercial energy code issued by the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE).

And, the energy intensity figure is a requirement over and 

above the additional requirement that the RSF be built to 

LEED® Platinum status, the highest designation by the U.S. 

Green Building Council.

The number was not chosen arbitrarily. Researchers from 

NREL’s Buildings Research and Development program 

performed computer simulations and collected data from 

high-performing buildings nationwide to create an energy 

specification that could be met within the project’s budget,

yet set an ambitious new energy efficiency benchmark for

the nation.

A First Time for Everything

Energy use intensity rarely is quantified in a building contract, 

even when project is designed to be a “green building.” And 

never before, researchers say, has such an aggressive energy 

savings requirement been demanded up front in the contract 

long before groundbreaking. 

“We set the energy efficiency requirement and everything in 

the RSF has cascaded from that number,” said Ron Judkoff, 

manager of NREL’s Buildings Research program.

“It is an unprecedented target and dominant design criteria,” 

Judkoff said. “It required all of the players in the project to 

commit to real energy efficiency. When you are trying to go 

that low, an integrated design approach is needed.”

The RSF is under construction at NREL’s 

South Table Mountain Campus near 

Golden, Colorado. The RSF will be a 

219,000 square-foot facility supporting 

more than 800 laboratory staff, along 

with an energy efficient information 

technology data center. It is scheduled to 

open in summer 2010.

Researchers say its design features will 

be shared with commercial developers in 

hopes it will be replicated as local conditions allow and without, as the researchers put it, “doing architectural gymnastics.”

“The Department of Energy’s goal was to make this a showcase for energy efficiency, and that’s what drove the design of 

the Research Support Facilities,” said Jeff Baker, Director of 

Laboratory Operations at the DOE Golden Field Office. Nineteen percent of the country’s energy is used in commercial 

buildings, he said. 

“We set the energy efficiency 

requirement and everything 

in the RSF has cascaded from 

that number.” – Ron Judkoff
54

“The DOE expects the RSF project to help reduce the nation’s 

energy consumption by changing the way commercial buildings are designed and built,” Baker said. “Where better to 

demonstrate what can be done than on the campus of the 

Department’s primary national laboratory for renewable 

energy and energy efficiency research and development?”

Buildings Can Do a Lot Better

NREL’s buildings R&D group has influenced the design of 

the laboratory’s facilities for more than two decades. Many of 

the campus buildings are among the most energy-efficient of 

their kinds, including the Thermal Test Facility, the Science & 

Technology Facility, the Solar Energy Research Facility, and the 

Visitors Center. 

Researchers had already studied the energy use of newer commercial buildings around the country. While some of them, 

such as the Chesapeake Bay Foundation’s headquarters at the 

Merrill Environmental Center in Annapolis, Maryland, had 

been awarded LEED Platinum status, they still did not emphasize energy efficiency as much as NREL researchers thought 

they should. 

Since RSF construction began spring 2008, the laboratory 

continues to grow rapidly. Because of its modular design that 

eschews structural columns, the interior has been creatively 

rearranged to accommodate nearly 100 additional staff. But 

more people require more energy, and so the energy use 

requirement for the office space has been nudged to 31.75 

kBtu/sf/year.

Then came the large new data center, vital to the laboratory’s 

significant and growing computational needs, but more than 

what a typical office building would include.

Data centers usually have voracious energy appetites. But this 

late addition still had to fit with the RSF concept. 

Researchers came up with a combination of evaporative 

cooling, outside air ventilation, waste heat capture and more 

efficient servers to reduce the center’s energy use by 50% over 

traditional approaches.

Because the data center serves the entire laboratory campus 

and not just the RSF, an energy allowance was added to reflect 

the exception to the project. Now the RSF energy use intensity 

including the data center is 35.1 kBtus/sf/year. That’s still 

better than most of today’s energy efficient buildings and well 

under half the energy used by a similar building built to code 

for the same budget. 

“Our energy simulations told us that buildings can perform 

a lot better,” NREL Principal Group Manager Paul Torcellini 

said. “NREL needs to lead the industry. We’ve maximized our 

impact by integrating today’s technologies to build a zeroenergy office building.”

When the $64 million project was first reviewed by RNL 

Design and Haselden Construction, architect Phillip Macey 

admits he did not immediately recognize how aggressive the 

energy use requirement was. But it quickly became the project’s fundamental characteristic—so primary, in fact, that RNL

and Stantec, the project’s engineers, drafted an energy model 

that acted as a starting point for the building’s form.

Macey realized the building’s design also would have to 

embrace Colorado’s sunny climate and the entire spectrum 

of passive building knowledge to find enough “free clean 

energy.”

“The energy use requirement told me that energy was going 

to drive the architecture,” Macey said. “It is an old concept in 

architecture that the building form should reflect the climate in 

which the building is located.”

He compared the energy requirement to finding a key and 

figuring out which door it unlocked. 

“That ‘locked door’ is the entry to the zero energy room,” 

Macey said. “We knew that if we could find a way to get to 

that energy level, it would likely unlock the zero-energy door 

for the entire building.”

The “lazy H” configuration of two narrow multi-story office wings 

connected by an enclosed bridge and courtyards allows daylight

to penetrate the RSF’s work spaces. NREL recommended that the 

office wings be no wider than 60 feet across rather than a typical 

120 feet. Courtesy of Haselden Construction/PIX 16772

Many Steps to Energy Efficiency

Architects and engineers incorporated hundreds of strategies 

and technologies that combine to save energy by emphasizing 

daylighting and natural ventilation.

Some involve the building’s largest and most pervasive 

systems:

•	 A “lazy H” configuration of two narrow multi-story office 

wings connected by an enclosed bridge and courtyards. To 

allow daylight to penetrate the work spaces, NREL recommended that the office wings be no wider than 60 feet across 

rather than a typical 120 feet.
LABORATORY OF THE FUTURE 

55

•	 Triple-glazed windows individually fitted with exterior 

overhanging shades and side-fins to reduce interior heat 

gain, heat loss and glare, while allowing for daylighting.

•	 Light-reflecting devices that push the daylight deeper into 

the office spaces.

•	 Insulated precast concrete walls for passive climate control, 

including transpired solar collectors for heating.

•	 Also for climate control, a dynamic 

network of automatically controlled windows, evaporative cooling, radiant heating and cooling, 

window glazing and heat recovery 

from the data center.

But it still wasn’t enough. Many 

smaller decisions were made with 

energy efficiency in mind to reach the 

final calculation. NREL researchers 

and the design team found savings in 

every aspect of the building’s use.

•	 Reducing kitchenettes from 1 for 

every 15 employees to every 20 employees.

•	 Using internet-tied telephones rather than standard models.

•	 Favoring laptop computers over PC workstations.

•	 More energy-efficient elevators including energy recapture.

•	 Highly reflective interior paint and workstations in neutral 

hues to enhance daylighting.

•	 Shutting off lights at night.

•	 Low workstation walls to encourage daylighting and

natural airflow.

Delivered at a Competitive Cost

The RSF is a “design-build” project in which the team will 

deliver the advanced building for a market-competitive price 

of about $280 per square foot. That’s another first for the project: laboratory researchers had to set their requirements for 

the building’s performance up front and have relatively few 

opportunities to make changes later.

So when the specifications were completed, the RFP ran a

staggering 780 pages. That’s longer than Homer’s epic poems, 

The Iliad and The Odyssey—combined.

But that exhaustive detail is meant to provide building

owners and developers a proven method for net-zero energy 

office buildings.

“We want to take energy efficiency to 

Main Street,” said NREL engineer Shanti 

Pless. “The key is to make it a requirement and integrate energy efficiency 

early in the design process.”

Haselden Construction and RNL are 

building the 219,000 square-foot RSF, 

which is designed to be a model for 

sustainable, high-performance building 

design, and will provide DOE-owned 

work space for administrative staff who 

currently occupy leased space in the 

nearby Denver West Office Park. The 

RSF was designed by RNL. Stantec

Consulting served as the project’s

engineering, energy modeling, and 

sustainability consultant. 

Comparison of Buildings Energy Use Intensity

•	 Average US office building: 90 kBtu/sf/year

•	 ASHRE code for new commercial space: 55 kBtu/sf/year

•	 Chesapeake Bay Foundation, Annapolis, Md.:

40 kBtu/sf/year

•	 Big Horn Hardware, Silverthorne, Colorado:

40 kBtu/sf/year

•	 NREL RSF: 35.1 kBtu/sf/yr, including the data center 

•	 NREL Thermal Test Facility: 29 kBtu/sf/year.

— Joseph B. Verrengia (Dec. 7, 2009)

“The energy use requirement 

told me that energy was going to 

drive the architecture. It is an old 

concept in architecture that the 

building form should reflect the 

climate in which the building

is located.” – Phillip Macey
56

UNIQUE RESEARCH TOOL AIMS

TO REDUCE PV COST

Senior Scientist Maikel van Hest holds a sample of a substrate 

used to make thin film solar cells in the Atmospheric Processing 

Platform. The large sample size makes it easier for industrial

partners to scale up the results of the prototyping.

Credit: Joe Verrengia/PIX 16881

NREL has installed its first Atmospheric Processing Platform to prototype lower-cost thin film solar cells from inks and other solutions.

Thin film technologies are spurring innovative new solar 

applications, such as modules that double as roof shingles, 

and semi-transparent modules that can be integrated into 

building walls or roofs. It has the 

potential to dramatically increase the 

generation of clean electricity.

But to become commercially successful, thin film manufacturing costs 

must be significantly reduced. The 

uniquely configured platform enables 

NREL scientists to work directly 

with industry partners to test novel 

designs and manufacturing methods 

using precise digital printing technologies under controlled conditions.

It allows collaborative research teams to isolate important 

steps in the thin-film manufacturing process and look for ways 

to refine or accelerate those steps with the intent of reducing 

the cost of the finished solar cell.

At 6.2 x 6.2 inches, the thin film PV samples the platform 

produces are much larger than what’s used in typical 

laboratory experiments, so the results can be more rapidly 

commercialized.

“There is no other laboratory platform quite like it in the world, 

and we’re already running real samples through some of its 

chambers,” senior scientist Maikel van Hest said. “We should 

be running samples continuously by the end of the summer.”

Less Heat, Less Pressure, Lower Costs

Traditionally, solar cells are made using intensive processes 

that includes depositing metal contacts and absorber layers. 

These processes typically require high temperatures and 

vacuum deposition, which adds expense and contributes to 

making solar electricity more expensive than electricity from 

conventional sources.

The new platform consists of several large glove boxes that 

are connected both by internal portals and a linear transport 

train that runs beneath the boxes. The system allows researchers to work with samples inside the glove boxes’ controlled 

conditions.

The heart of the platform, van Hest says, is a pair of glove 

boxes fitted with a variety of solution deposition techniques 

that can be used for different aspects of thin film manufacturing at ambient pressures. The thin films are made from inks 

and other solutions made of material precursors and nanoparticles. They can be deposited on common substrates such as 

glass, plastic, and metal, and closely examined—one layer at a 

time.

The solution deposition techniques themselves are commercially available units, but the platform can use them in 

unconventional ways. 

Three Different Nozzles

Ink jet printers can replicate complex and specific images, 

and offer advantages for precisely adding patterns of metal 

contacts from solutions such as nickel 

and silver inks.

Aerosol jets provide a very fine mist to 

write a specific pattern, working much 

like a plotter moving back and forth.

Ultrasonic sprayers can be used to 

deposit homogenous layers of conducting, semiconducting, or dielectric 

materials

All three methods use very small 

amounts of ink in precise patterns to improve manufacturing 

efficiencies. Because the solution deposition tools don’t make 

direct contact with the samples like screen printing, losses 

from breakage and blemishes are reduced, too.

“There is no other laboratory 

platform quite like it in the world, 

and we’re already running

real samples through some of

its chambers.” – Maikel van Hest
PHOTOVOLTAICS

57

“There are significant cost savings especially as you scale up,” 

van Hest said.

The platform also includes work stations that allow researchers to assess prototype PV cells under the same controlled 

conditions, including X-ray fluorescence for compositional 

analysis and X-ray diffraction for structural analysis.

Prototype thin film cells move through the platform in about 

a minute. At the industrial scale, thin-film cells need to be 

manufactured in a few seconds or less.

“But speed is not our main concern—

this isn’t a factory,” van Hest said. 

“Doing this in a minute is sufficient to 

develop new materials, new contacts 

and new processing approaches. We 

know these deposition techniques can 

be sped up to industrial speeds.”

“If you can do it faster, it’s always 

better—and it will get faster,” he said. 

“But what this system really lets us

do is go back and forth between the 

glove boxes and develop new concepts 

and materials.”

The Atmospheric Processing Platform is located in the

Process and Development Integration Laboratory (PDIL)

at NREL’s Scientific and Technology Facility. 

The PDIL is a unique collaborative facility for scientists

and industry to examine pressing questions related to the 

commercialization of next-generation photovoltaics. The

PDIL integrates the most advanced equipment to optimize

the productivity of new solar technologies and accelerate

their commercialization.

Advantages of the Atmospheric 

Processing Platform

•	 Low cost

•	 High thru-put

•	 Easy prototyping

•	 Compositional control

•	 Efficient use of materials.

— Joseph B. Verrengia (July 10, 2009)

“If you can do it faster, it’s always 

better—and it will get faster.

But what this system really 

lets us do is go back and forth 

between the glove boxes

and develop new concepts

and materials.” – Maikel van Hest

An ink jet printer assembly inside a glove box of the Atmospheric 

Processing Platform. Credit: Joe Verrengia/PIX 16882
58

NREL HELPS SORT GREEN 

TRANSPORTATION OPTIONS

New Belgium Brewery shows off one of the 31 Toyota Prius 

Hybrids that New Belgium uses in its light-duty fleet.

Credit: Heather Lammers/PIX 16866

Using a company vehicle used to be a simple (but not so 

green) routine. An employee filled up the car with gasoline at the fleet pump, turned the key and was on his 

way. Efforts to reduce the environmental impact of driving 

mean more choices, though. Fleet managers now can pick from green options such as 

E-85, biodiesel, propane and an assortment 

of hybrids. That can be a little confusing, but 

NREL and U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) 

are helping companies decide which transportation choices best fit their sustainability 

goals by providing a variety of online tools. 

The Alternative Fuels and Advanced 

Vehicles Data Center (AFDC) is managed 

by NREL for DOE and has more than 3,000 

sources of data that can serve as resources 

for fleet managers and consumers. “The AFDC Web site takes 

technical information and translates the information into userfriendly tools,” said Margo Melendez, Senior Project Leader, 

Clean Cities. “These tools help fleet managers make educated 

transportation choices and are geared toward helping consumers and fleets reduce petroleum consumption.” 

Fleets regularly use the information offered on the AFDC

Web site to help meet efficiency goals and the Web site also 

champions their success stories to encourage others. Here are 

just a few examples of organizations that have navigated to 

greener fleets.

New Belgium Chooses Hybrids for Sales Team

New Belgium Brewing, maker of Fat Tire Amber Ale and 

other Belgian inspired beers, has always looked for ways to be 

energy efficient and socially responsible. Since its beginning, 

the company has participated in developing technologies. 

“We think success lies not only in healthy profits, but in 

healthy people and planet,” Sustainability Specialist Katie 

Wallace said. “Our business decisions reflect these beliefs. 

We’re not profitable in spite of our progressive practices but 

because of them.”

New Belgium’s fleet is 99% light-duty vehicles, which are used 

by sales representatives in 18 states. In its fleet of 95 vehicles, 

there are 31 Prius hybrids, three Ford Escape hybrids, and 

one Nissan Altima hybrid. In addition, New Belgium has 

experimented with a B100 (100% biodiesel) made from yellow 

grease. The company currently is exploring options outside of 

first-generation biofuels. 

“We’ve definitely taken advantage of the tools on the AFDC 

Web site to help with fleet decisions,” noted Wallace. “We’ve 

used the online data to compare the efficiencies of vehicles we 

might be considering.”

Wallace also thinks that the issues surrounding fleets at New 

Belgium still are evolving. “We are always looking for the next 

step in sustainable fuel. Electric hybrids are a good transition, 

but not the final solution.”

Another solution employees have embraced is old school, but 

very healthy—the bicycle. The emblem for one of New Belgium’s beers, the bicycle is a staple of the company’s culture. 

Bikes are available to employees to run errands during the day 

and encouraged for use in local sales calls and trips around 

Fort Collins, Colorado, where the company is headquartered. 

The company gives employees bikes on their one year anniversaries with the brewery.

Zion National Park Clears the Air 

with Propane

Zion National Park in Utah prides 

itself as a green parks leader and has 

earned a designation as a Climate 

Friendly Park by completing a 

Greenhouse Gas Emission Inventory 

and Action Plan to reduce greenhouse gases. The national park is 

committed to energy efficiency, and 

recycling, and supplies bicycles for employees to use on duty. 

Zion operates 30 propane-powered shuttle buses for visitors. 

Handling the transportation pieces of their efforts is Parks 

Transportation, Inc. The program statistics are staggering. The 

park has more than 2.7 million visitors a year and has logged 

14,951,190 shuttle passenger miles since the inception of the 

program in 2000. With an average of 1,076 Btu of energy used 

per passenger mile, the shuttle buses are about three times 

more fuel efficient than passenger cars. This helps account 

for a reduction in carbon dioxide emissions inside the park 

estimated at 6,263,250 pounds. 

“We are always looking for the 

next step in sustainable fuel. 

Electric hybrids are a good 

transition, but not the final 

solution.” – Katie Wallace
RENEWABLE RESOURCE MAPS & DATA 

59

“The park is committed to continuing and expanding the use 

of energy efficient and green vehicles,” said Ron Terry, Chief 

of Interpretation and Visitor Services for Zion National Park. 

“The program has been well received and has been studied by 

other national parks considering a similar system.”

Guests in Zion National Park also 

have taken notice of the shuttle 

system, which stops at nine different locations throughout the park 

and at six locations in the neighboring town of Springdale. “Visitors 

especially notice how quiet the 

shuttles are.” Terry said. “The 

use of these vehicles fits perfectly 

with the purposes and mission of 

the national parks and is the right 

thing to do.”

Vehicles are only one aspect of 

Zion National Park’s sustainability 

efforts. NREL has worked with 

Zion officials to build an energy efficient Visitor’s Center 

which uses solar power, passive downdraft cooling and 

Trombe walls to store the heat for release into the building 

later in the day. Learn more about the Zion Visitor’s Center on 

the DOE Web site.

“We have energy efficient buildings and are continuing to add 

to our efforts with an expansion of solar technology,” Terry 

said “We are also heavily into recycling and purchasing ‘green 

products,’ all of these efforts are in support of our designation 

as a Climate Friendly Park.”

L.L. Bean Embraces B20

In 2003, L.L. Bean was the first major Maine-based company 

to test market biodiesel in its distribution fleet and converted 

its heavy-duty truck fleet to B20 biodiesel fuel (20% non-petroleum based diesel mixed with 80% conventional petroleum 

based diesel).

Currently, L.L. Bean has 13 B20-fueled tractor rigs that move 

trailers between its warehouse locations. Seventeen of the 

company’s Maine Outdoor Discovery School shuttles, which 

transfer customers from retail stores to off-site locations for 

classes, are configured to run on biodiesel as well. 

The company’s history of environmental 

efforts has been noticed. “Our customers 

are very concerned about the environment 

and want assurances that we are taking the 

steps to protect and preserve our natural 

spaces,” Senior Public Relations Representative Laurie Brooks said. “Customers 

routinely visit the Environmental section of 

our Web site, which details our efforts and 

progress on environmental issues.”

L.L. Bean continues to look at options when 

it comes to its fleet opportunities. In 2008, 

the company added a hybrid vehicle to the 

corporate vehicle fleet and is encouraging 

its employees to carpool to work through 

ECOBean (Employee Commuting Options). The program provides prime parking spaces for employees who carpool. 

“We continue to monitor advances in commercial vehicles in 

regards to alternative fuels,” Brooks said. “The AFDC Web site 

serves as an excellent reference source for us when making 

these decisions.”

— Heather Lammers (April 10, 2009)

“We continue to monitor 

advances in commercial vehicles 

in regards to alternative fuels. 

The AFDC Web site serves as 

an excellent reference source 

for us when making these 

decisions.” – Laurie Brooks
60

ON THE ROAD WITH

ALTERNATIVE FUELS

Future upgrades to the MAFSL include automatic location

detection using GPS installed in the device so users don’t

have to type in where they are. Credit: Heather Lammers/PIX 16883

D

rivers now can take a popular tool on the road thanks 

to staff at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory 

(NREL). The Mobile Alternative Fueling Station Locator 

(MAFSL) helps on-the-go drivers find the five closest biodiesel, 

electricity, E85 (ethanol), hydrogen, natural gas, and propane 

fueling sites using any mobile device with Internet access.

“We heard from our users that it would be nice to have this 

tool with them on the road,” NREL Deployment Application 

Lead Johanna Levene said. Before launching a mobile version, the Alternative Fueling Station Locator was consistently 

among the top five applications used on the U.S. Department 

of Energy’s Alternative Fuels and Advanced Vehicles Data 

Center (AFDC) Web site. The station locator was developed by 

NREL, which manages the AFDC.

Trip Planning Made Easy

The mobile station locator uses well-known, easy-to-navigate 

Google Maps to automatically generate maps to fueling sites. 

The mobile application also lists contact information and business hours for stations. A family road trip in an alternative fuel 

vehicle used to take a little extra effort and planning. But, the 

easy to use mapping tool is one of the reasons that Colorado 

resident Chad Scullion began using the MAFSL when driving his flex-fuel E-85 pickup to visit family in Wyoming. 

“The mapping feature is great for use on trips and the station 

information is constantly updated,” said Scullion. “It used to 

be that there were only two stations I could find in Wyoming, 

now there are five.” 

Scullion made the switch to an alternative fuel vehicle in 

summer 2008, buying a flex-fuel E-85 Nissan truck, which 

is what he takes when he goes fishing in the Colorado high 

country. “About a month or so after I bought the truck I used 

the tool to find two stations in the mountains,” Scullion said. 

Scullion is so happy with his alternative fuel vehicle that he is 

considering converting his wife’s Volkswagen Jetta to E-85 as 

well. “Maybe she’ll be a user too.”

Renewable Energy and Efficiency Education on Wheels 

(RnE2EW) Coordinator Rick Shin also knows the importance 

of having a tool to help him find stations to fuel his propane 

powered 27-foot RnE2EW educational vehicle. “Although 

propane burns clean, it’s something you can’t get 24/7,” Shin 

said. “I have to plan trips so that we can get to places to fuel 

up between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m.” 

RnE2EW is an educational-outreach vehicle designed to 

educate students, teachers, and the community in renewable 

energy and efficiency sciences as well as to showcase DOE/

NREL research and technology. 

Shin travels the country in the RnE2EW educational vehicle 

speaking to kindergarten through sixth grade students. He has 

taken RnE2EW from coast to coast with stops from Washington D.C to San Jose, California. Shin noted that in his travels 

he’s only seen a few propane powered vehicles and publically 

available fueling stations can be hard to find.

“The locator is important because it gives you the name, 

address, and hours of the stations,” Shin said. “This information is great to have because we have to call ahead to make 

sure that someone is really there who can pump the propane. 

This is especially true on Sundays because certain states will 

only let trained employees operate the pumps.”

Before using the MAFSL, Shin would rely on major truck 

stops as fueling locations, which had issues of its own. “Other 

vehicles typically have a 300-mile range so you normally find 

major truck stops spaced that far apart,” Shin said. “RnE2EW 

has a range of about 250 miles so we’ve used the locator tool to 

find other stops along the way, so it’s really good to know the 

locator is out there.”

New Features in the Works

Once a tool is placed on the World Wide Web, it’s easy for 

users to come up with suggestions for improvements. That 

type of user feedback is welcome and is taken into consideration as the developers work on enhancements. “Our users 

asked that we start including private fueling stations in the 

database,” said Levene. “It’s something we didn’t think there 

would be a demand for but have added.” Future upgrades to 

the MAFSL might also include:

•	 Automatic location detection using GPS installed in the 

device so users don’t have to type in where they are

•	 An application for the popular iPhone

•	 Creating a similar stand-alone application for truck stop 

electrification sites.

Another priority for the team is keeping the data used by the 

MAFSL up to date. Currently, E-85 information is updated 

every other week and all other fuel information is updated 

monthly. Every year, all of the fueling stations are contacted to 

make sure their information is correct. And, any information 

sent to the AFDC Web site by users is updated as well.

“We want this tool to be intuitive and easy to use,” said 

Levene. “We want you to get the information in two to three 

clicks so people can be on their way.”

— Heather Lammers (July 24, 2009)
WIND 

61

BIGGER AND BETTER: LAB AIMS TO 

IMPROVE GIANT WIND TURBINES

Blades of the General Electric 1.5 MW turbine are being stored outside on cradles this winter at the National Wind Technology Center. 

They are secured with large concrete blocks to prevent them from 

being damaged during high winds and storms. Credit: Jim Green/PIX 16179

I

f the United States is going to generate 20% of its electricity 

from the wind in the next 20 years, wind turbines will need

to evolve in every way—larger, taller, less expensive, more 

reliable, and more efficient.

At NREL’s National Wind Technology Center (NWTC), engineers are preparing to install the two largest turbines ever 

tested at the laboratory. Key elements of a 1.5 MW General 

Electric (GE) turbine have begun arriving; instrumentation and 

equipment testing should begin by late summer. Installation of 

a 2.3 MW turbine from Siemens Power Generation is scheduled 

for late summer, too.

Both turbines will be erected on the NWTC’s eastern perimeter, 

where they will run for years while serving as prominent sentinels overlooking metropolitan Denver.

“We need to understand how these big turbines respond,” said 

senior project leader Jim Green, who is leading the GE tests. 

“Increasing their performance, reducing their loads, creating 

components that last longer—we’ll need to learn about all those 

things if we’re going to make more wind power.” 

Supersized Wind Turbines

The GE turbine will operate atop a 262-foot steel tower. The 

diameter of its rotor will reach 250 feet. Its total weight, including the tower, will approach 220 tons.

The only visible part of the foundation will be the bolt circle 

for the tower itself, but looks can be deceiving. Covered with 

dirt for extra weight, its octagonal concrete foundation pad will 

measure 50 feet across and weigh about 500 tons. 

“The pad has to be that big,” Green said, “because that’s what 

keeps the whole thing standing upright in high winds.”

Special overland trucks started arriving at the NWTC in December carrying sections of the GE system. The trucks are up to 195 

feet long—three times as long as a typical 18-wheeler. They use 

as many as 13 axles to distribute the weight of their huge cargo.

The trucks took a designated route on major roads that are 

designed to handle oversized loads and traveled at times that 

would not disrupt traffic. Two of the trucks were followed by a 

separate escort vehicle that remotely steered the trailer’s

rear wheels by radio signals to help the long trucks negotiate 

tight corners. 

In mid-December, the tower sections arrived from Tulsa, 

Oklahoma; the blades from Aberdeen, South Dakota; and the 

generator housing and rotor hub from Pensacola, Florida. 

During the spring, NREL will build new access roads to the 

planned turbine pads and provide other site preparation. NREL 

is purchasing the turbine for the U.S. Department of Energy 

under a subcontract with GE.

The GE turbine is already a workhorse commercial model, 

accounting for nearly half of all turbine sales in the United 

States. The NREL tests are intended to discover ways to squeeze 

more power out of existing wind farms and improve the durability of the turbine’s components.

“Any improvements we can make will have a lot of leverage

in the wind industry,” Green said.

Bigger than a Football Field

The Siemens 2.3 MW turbine will be noticeably larger than

the GE. It will use a similar tower, but its rotor diameter is a 

whopping 331 feet—more than the length of a football field!

Unlike the GE, the Siemens model is a late-stage prototype. It 

features a novel blade design that captures more of the wind’s 

energy, but is not supposed to force any more load onto the 

turbine’s moving parts and control systems. It will be heavily 

instrumented to produce a constant stream of data on aerodynamics, power characteristics, vibrations, system fatigue, 

acoustics, and other key measurements.

The tests will be conducted in three phases through late 2011.

“These tests will verify the performance of the new blades 

under real and challenging conditions,” said NREL senior 

engineer, Lee Jay Fingersh, who is project lead for the Siemens 

turbine.

“It looks very graceful and simple, but the aerodynamics of a 

wind turbine are harder to understand than an airplane or a 

helicopter,” he said.

Siemens is providing the turbine, engineering support and 

maintenance from its new R&D office in nearby Boulder. NREL 

is providing the site, installation services and expertise in field 

aerodynamics testing, structure and reliability testing and 

meteorological analysis.

The NWTC would make a poor commercial wind farm, but the 

location downwind from Eldorado Canyon and the Continental Divide provides gusty conditions that challenge turbine 

and blade designs and generate data at the equipment’s limits. 

Motorists on Highways 93 and 128 can expect to see the giant 

turbines operating regularly.

“The turbines generate more power than we can use at the 

NWTC,” Fingersh said. “We’ll become an exporter of electricity 

and be able to offset some of the program’s costs.”

— Joseph B. Verrengia (Jan. 30, 2009)
W

62

NREL GEARBOX STUDY AIMS TO 

GREASE WIND POWER’S FUTURE

NREL senior engineer Shuangwen Sheng inspects the monitoring 

system for the long-term gearbox reliability study at the National 

Wind Technology Center. Credit: Joseph B. Verrengia/PIX 16867

ind turbines appear so simple—tall white sentinels cranking gracefully on the horizon.

But up close, a wind turbine is an industrial workhorse. Inside the 

nacelle hundreds of feet off the ground, hot metal gears grind and 

strain as shifting winds pull and twist the long flexible blades.

At NREL, senior engineers are expanding a research partnership with operators, utilities and turbine manufacturers to 

determine why some key wind turbine components tend to 

wear too soon—sometimes within a few years of installation.

That’s a problem because wind turbines are expected to operate for 20 years. Early equipment fatigue, especially in turbine 

gearboxes, threatens to reduce performance and drive up wind 

power costs just as the industry is poised to capture a greater 

share of U.S. generating capacity.

Improving their reliability is key to generating a consistently 

competitive power source, and a healthy return on investment. 

Both are needed if wind power is to meet 20% of the nation’s 

electricity needs by 2030, a scenario a U.S. Department of 

Energy report issued in 2008 says is possible.

“The end users and the owner-operators say we’re only getting 

five years, or in some cases, three years out of these gearboxes,” 

said NREL principal engineer Sandy Butterfield, who is leading 

the cooperative study.

Newer turbine designs may work, but without the NREL study 

it will take a number of operating years in the field to prove that 

the reliability problems have been resolved. 

“This project is designed to search for any residual gaps in the 

design process and confirm a robust design practice used in current production turbines,” Butterfield said. “We can’t wait five 

more years to discover any residual gaps.”

Collective Examination

In 2007, Butterfield, senior engineer Walt Musial and consultant 

Brian McNiff began assembling the Gearbox Reliability Collaborative among turbine manufacturers, utilities and suppliers. 

The collaborative tests extensively instrumented gearboxes to 

identify weakness in current design approaches and pointed out 

ways to improve initial designs and retrofit packages.

The project identifies equipment failures that are common 

throughout the industry and targets deficiencies in the design 

process that are contributing to these problems. 

NREL hopes to limit intellectual property concerns by running 

tests on representative wind turbine configurations and parts, but 

not replicating any specific manufacturer’s wind turbine model.

At the same time, the participants are expected to openly examine turbine problems and question every assumption of the 

design process.

Focusing on design is especially important, Butterfield said, 

because the expanding wind industry is trying to rapidly meet 

market demand for new and larger-capacity turbines. Designers 

and manufacturers are all following very stringent design quality, in some cases matching aircraft tolerances. Yet the problems 

persist. This implies the design standards are missing some 

critical loads or conditions that are unique to wind turbines. 

Without identifying the fundamental issues behind previous 

failures, he said, the same flaws could find their ways into new 

generations of turbines.

Nitty-Gritty of Gearboxes

The tests at the National Wind Technology Center (NWTC) 

focus on several aspects of gearbox performance:

•	 Automated spray lubrication. Wind turbines crank at low 

RPMs under high torque, especially in the first stage of

gearing where heat and pressure are high. New designs

have lubrication channeled directly to the bearing races. 

•	 Oil cleanliness. New turbines have more aggressive

filtration systems.

•	 Automated gearbox monitoring instruments. These

systems are supposed to detect damaging operating

conditions before a failure occurs.

•	 Micro-pitting. This phenomenon occurs as metal fatigue

creates microscopic weak spots in gears that degrade the 

equipment over time.

•	 Load distributions on the gear tooth contacts and the

bearing roller elements.

Initially, the gearboxes under review are being tested on

the NWTC dynamometer, where Butterfield and others will 

simulate a variety of loads and measure the results.

Later, they will put one gearbox into test turbines at the Xcel 

Energy Ponnequin wind farm and monitor them under real 

load conditions.

A second testing phase is likely to follow. 

Butterfield also intends to build a significant failure database 

to baseline current failure rates and verify reliability improvements in the future.

“I know we’ll discover a tremendous amount in the first year,” 

he said. “We hope we can quickly transfer this experience to

the industry.”

— Joseph B. Verrengia (April 17, 2009)
WIND 

63

WIND TECHNOLOGY CENTER 

INSTALLING A DYNAMIC DUO

Blue skies and calm conditions contributed to a smooth

installation of a General Electric 1.5 MW wind turbine at

the National Wind Technology Center. Credit: Pat Corkery/PIX 16570

T

he clean wind energy industry must expand significantly in the next two decades to fulfill a strategy of

generating 20% of the nation’s electricity. To provide 

the technological foundation for that dramatic growth, the 

National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) is embarking on significant improvements at its National Wind

Technology Center (NWTC).

Engineers are installing the two largest turbines ever tested

at the laboratory—a 1.5 MW turbine manufactured by

General Electric (GE) and a 2.3 MW turbine from Siemens 

Power Generation.

Both turbines are being erected on the NWTC’s eastern 

perimeter for commissioning and operations in October. 

They will run for years under close observation and elaborate 

instrumentation. With data from these experiments, researchers will be working with the wind industry to increase turbine 

performance, improve durability and decrease loads.

The new turbines also allow NREL to take a significant step 

forward in generating its own clean electricity and meeting 

the laboratory’s aggressive sustainability goals and reduce 

greenhouse gas emissions for its expanding research campus 

and support facilities. The new turbines are expected to generate twice as much energy as the NWTC uses. The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), NREL, and Xcel Energy are working 

to define an agreement that will allow surplus energy to be 

exported and sold to the local utility grid.

DOE Purchase for the NWTC

DOE purchased the 1.5 MW turbine for the NWTC. Crews 

using a crane assembled it over three days. The rotor was 

expected to fly—or be attached—on August 21, 2009.

The DOE turbine will operate atop a 262-foot steel tower.

The diameter of its rotor will reach 253 feet.

“The DOE turbine is a national asset for the NWTC to operate 

as a test bed for wind energy research and development,” said 

NWTC assistant director for Testing and Operations, David 

Simms. “They would like us to offer it as a test bed for the best 

and brightest researchers from universities, laboratories, and 

companies around the country.” 

The DOE turbine was manufactured by GE and is a workhorse 

of the domestic wind power industry. More than 10,000 now 

operate at commercial wind farms around the nation, accounting for about 50% of the U.S. market. Because of its market 

share, NREL researchers say it is important to more fully 

understand the turbine’s performance in the field and look for 

ways to help advance its design.

Among the questions researchers will address are the microclimate in which the turbine operates, the aerodynamics of 

the turbine design and the effects of turbulence on its load 

and performance—and how all these factors may combine in 

potentially unforeseen ways. The NWTC was located at the 

base of the Rocky Mountains to take advantage of particularly 

gusty, challenging winds in order to challenge turbine designs 

in conditions not typically seen at commercial locations.

“If we could improve performance, thousands of turbines 

could remain in operation for years beyond the industry’s 

original expectations,” said NREL senior project leader Jim 

Green. 

Additional trucks will be delivering the Siemens wind turbine, 

the cranes, and other installation equipment in August and 

September of 2009. The Siemens turbine will use a second 

tower of the same height, but its rotor diameter is 331 feet, 

or more than 30% bigger than the DOE turbine. The Siemens 

turbine employs an advanced new rotor design that needs 

field testing in the NWTC’s gusty and challenging conditions. 

Siemens has opened a research office in Boulder to provide 

engineering support and maintenance. 

Siemens Turbine Among the Largest in the

United States

“It’s as large as any turbine in North America,” said project 

leader Lee Jay Fingersh. “The final design is different than 

most turbines with a different blade shape. Land-based turbines are getting larger to meet the demand for wind energy. 

This is the direction of the wind industry and we want to 

understand the aerodynamics of these new, larger machines.”

NREL is providing the site, the foundation and the electrical 

connection for the turbine, the cost of delivery, installation 

services and expertise in field aerodynamics testing, structure 

and reliability testing and meteorological analysis. NREL and 

Siemens have signed a cooperative research and development 

agreement that is expected to continue into 2014.
64

The Siemens turbine was selected for testing by the DOE after 

a national competition.

More Than Meets the Eye

As considerable as the new turbines are, NREL researchers are 

equally interested in what is required beneath the ground in 

order to support such imposing machines, which can weigh 

more than 300 tons.

NREL engineers worked with Renewable Energy Systems 

(RES) Americas, Inc., to pour the large customized concrete 

foundations for the turbines. The concrete was delivered in 

July in impressive convoy of more than 80 trucks.

NREL and RES Americas have signed a cooperative research 

and development agreement to study the design and performance of turbine foundations to increase the reliability of 

non-turbine components and lower the cost of wind-generated 

power. RES Americas recently established its U.S. headquarters in Broomfield, Colorado, near the NWTC. 

Research questions include structural loads on foundations 

of operating wind turbines, thermal performance of underground collection system electrical cables, and side-by-side 

comparisons of alternative wind speed measurement systems. 

“This CRADA will result in some of the first-ever measurements of loads inside and under the foundation of an operating wind turbine,” Green said.

After the two new turbines are operating, NWTC engineers 

will erect two new meteorological towers to the west of the 

turbines. Each tower will stand 440 feet high and feature more 

than 60 instruments to collect the most advanced information 

on the wind, temperature, dew point, precipitation, and other 

weather features that can influence the performance and lifespan of a wind turbine.

NREL and the wind energy industry are turning to taller 

towers to characterize the wind resources and conditions 

higher up where new, larger turbines operate.

The new towers also will feature LED lights that require 

virtually no maintenance and use a fraction of the energy of 

conventional lights. 

After the towers are completed this fall, crews will remove the 

red flashing warning lights atop the new wind turbines and 

three of the existing meteorological towers, too, leaving the 

NWTC with a total of three lighted towers.

A worker waits for a crane to gently deliver a section of the metal 

tower supporting a General Electric 1.5 MW wind turbine at the 

National Wind Technology Center. Credit: Pat Corkery/PIX 16565

DOE/GE 1.5 MW Vital Statistics

•	 Hub height – 80 meters (262.5 feet)

•	 Radius – 38.5 meters (126.3 feet)

•	 Total ground to tip = 118.5 meters (388.8 feet).

Siemens 2.3 MW Vital Statistics

•	 Hub Height – 80 meters (262.5 feet)

•	 Radius – 50.5m (165.7 feet)

•	 Total ground to tip = 130.5 meters (428.2 feet).

Power Generation

•	 Average US home monthly electricity consumption in

2007 = 936 kWh

•	 DOE/GE estimated production from DOE/GE turbine

at the NWTC* = 1,600,000 kWh/year (enough to serve

142 homes)

•	 Siemens 2.3 MW estimated production at the NWTC*

= 2,800,000 kWh/year (enough to serve 249 homes).

*The NWTC is a testing site. Production at more typical

commercial wind farm would be higher.

— Joseph B. Verrengia (Aug. 21, 2009)
WIND 

65

LARGEST WIND R&D STUDY 

UNDERWAY AT NREL

Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter, NREL Director Dan Arvizu and Siemens 

Senior Vice President Barry Nicholls flip the ceremonial switch to 

start the rotors on the new wind turbine. Courtesy of Siemens/PIX 16895

S

trong winds are a common research partner for scientists 

working at NREL’s National Wind Technology Center 

(NWTC). Recently, those gusting Colorado winds helped 

usher in a new milestone for wind technology research and 

development. NREL and Siemens Power Generation “flipped 

the switch” starting the blades on a Siemens 2.3 megawatt 

wind turbine installed as part of a 

cooperative research and development agreement (CRADA) for testing turbine aerodynamics, structure, 

and reliability.

“The state-of-the-art wind turbine 

you see before us is the focal point 

for the largest and most significant 

government-industry wind power 

R&D project ever to be undertaken,” 

NREL Director Dan Arvizu said. 

“Under the cooperative research and 

development agreement we have 

in place, Siemens Energy, NREL, and the U.S. Department of 

Energy will put this 2.3 megawatt turbine through all of its 

paces, in all kinds of conditions, in a rigorous testing regime 

that will continue for a minimum of three years, at a shared 

cost of $14 million.”

NREL’s Arvizu was joined at a turbine commissioning event by 

executives from Siemens and the U.S. Department of Energy 

(DOE), as well as Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter, who lauded the 

latest partner to join NREL’s clean energy research portfolio.

“Siemens joins an inspiring list of visionary companies that are 

becoming part of Colorado’s New Energy Economy,” Ritter 

said. “Together, with public and private partners like these, we 

are leading America toward a new, cleaner and more secure 

energy future.”

The Siemens 2.3 MW turbine is among the largest land-based 

turbines deployed in the marketplace. As visitors sat below the 

massive 331-foot-diameter rotor resting atop a 262-foot tower, 

event speakers noted the primary objective for the joint NRELSiemens research is to better understand the aerodynamics of 

these new, larger-land based machines. Under the CRADA, 

teams will test the turbine and its features for a minimum of 

three years involving a full range of real-world operating conditions, including severe weather. To split the cost of the $14 

million research program, Siemens will contribute $9 million 

and NREL $5 million.

“At Siemens, innovation is one of our core values. That’s why 

we are especially pleased to join forces with our nation’s leading wind research facility,” Senior Vice President of Siemens 

Energy Barry Nicholls said. “This important new research 

program will help us further enhance the performance of our 

turbines and lower the cost of clean, wind-generated power, 

which in turn will help diversify the overall mix of power

generation sources in the U.S.”

New Technology to Be Put through the Paces

NREL engineers began installing the massive turbine this 

summer. Although similar to turbines currently being used to 

generate power, the Siemens wind turbine at the NWTC is a 

late-stage prototype that features a new blade designed to

capture more of the wind’s energy without increasing the 

loads that can cause wear on the other turbine parts.

The turbine also is fitted with many instruments that will

provide turbine performance data including:

•	 Aerodynamics

•	 Power characteristics

•	 Vibration monitoring

•	 System fatigue

•	 Acoustics, and others.

“This is the best place in the world 

(for these kinds of tests), this is the hot 

house of aerodynamic and atmospheric 

research,” Siemens Chief Technology 

Officer Henrik Stiesdal said. “We want 

pressure and blade variations (data) as it 

rotates; we want it to be beaten up here. This ... will enable us 

to reduce the cost of energy.”

CRADA partners believe the research will support the wind 

industry’s efforts to enhance the reliability and performance 

of utility-scale commercial wind turbines. If this is achieved, it 

will enable the industry to improve its manufacturing processes—another factor that will help continue bringing down 

the price of wind energy. 

“The state-of-the-art wind turbine 

you see before us is the focal 

point for the largest and most 

significant government-industry 

wind power R&D project ever

to be undertaken.” – Dan Arvizu
66

“Colorado has the leading corridor for renewable energy R&D 

in America and the world. And I know this is true because no 

one has openly disagreed with me,” Gov. Ritter said, smiling. “Our energy future is transforming beneath our feet. Our 

children and grandchildren will produce and consume energy 

far differently than we do today.”

In addition to the turbines themselves, NREL researchers are 

studying the foundations needed to support large wind turbines. NREL and Renewable Energy Systems Americas (RES) 

have entered into a separate but coordinated agreement to 

examine the design and performance of turbine foundations, 

with goals of increasing the reliability of non-turbine components. This will also help reduce turbine installation costs.

Turbine Helps Green NREL and the Country

The new turbine and other new projects underway at the 

NWTC will allow NREL to take a significant step forward 

in generating its own clean electricity. The laboratory has 

aggressive sustainability goals—including the reduction of 

greenhouse gas emissions while at the same time meeting the 

energy needs of NREL’s expanding campus. The Siemens turbine coupled with a recently installed 1.5 MW GE turbine will 

allow the NWTC to generate more electricity than it uses. DOE 

and Xcel Energy are negotiating an agreement for surplus 

energy to be exported and sold to the local utility grid.

Another important goal for the turbine research project is to 

help policy makers better understand how we can generate 

20% of the country’s electricity from wind over the next 20 

years.

“Last year, NREL worked with the Department of Energy to 

publish the most comprehensive examination of wind power 

potential in the United States,” Arvizu said. “The study for the 

first time demonstrated that it’s feasible to produce 20% of our 

nation’s electricity needs from wind energy. And that is a crucial understanding—because achieving 20% wind energy will 

create hundreds of thousands of jobs, dramatically reduce our 

greenhouse gas emissions, and help free us from our dependence on foreign fuel supplies.”

Arvizu also noted that with NREL’s participation in these 

types of CRADAs, the lab will help position the United States 

as a leader in developing the most advanced wind turbines in 

the world.

The new turbine will allow NREL to take a significant step forward 

in generating its own clean electricity. The Siemens turbine coupled 

with a recently installed 1.5 MW GE turbine will allow the NWTC 

to generate more electricity than it uses. DOE and Xcel Energy are 

negotiating an agreement for surplus energy to be exported and 

sold to the local utility grid. Credit: George Douglas/PIX 16896

The NREL-Siemens CRADA is part of a coordinated wind 

research program supported by DOE’s Office of Energy

Efficiency and Renewable Energy. 

Siemens 2.3 MW Turbine Fast Facts

•	 Model - Siemens 2.3-101

•	 Production (NWTC Site) - 2,800 MWh/year

•	 Production (Typical Site) - 7,050 MWh/year

•	 Homes Powered (Typical Site) - 630

•	 Tower Height - 80 m / 262.5 ft

•	 Rotor Diameter - 101 m / 331.4 ft

•	 Swept Area - 8k m2

 / 86.2 ft2

•	 Total Height - 131 m / 428.1 ft.

— Heather Lammers (Oct. 23, 2009)
COMMUNITY OUTREACH

67

SCIENCE BOWL IS FUN WITH

A FUTURE

Crucibles team captain David Wu congratulates Shreesh Naik

on winning the Colorado Science Bowl while teammate Alex Wu 

looks on. Credit: Jack Dempsey/PIX 16901

Q

uick—you have just a few seconds to come up with an 

answer to the following question, “Which of the following terms best describes the albedo of a planet: A) electromagnetic energy B) density C) reflectivity D) absorption”. The 

answer is... we’ll tell you at the end of this story. High school 

students from across the country are currently spending hours 

quizzing each other on questions like this in preparation for 

the 2009 National Science Bowl. 

Don’t jump to conclusions about what you’ll find at the science bowl—it isn’t just honor roll students strutting their stuff 

through quick Q & A. From tie-dyed lab coats, to duct-tape 

gladiator costumes, students also creatively express their 

enthusiasm and excitement for the sciences. “We truly enjoy 

science,” said Arapahoe High School student Jon Karr, “with 

science there are so many places you can go in life.” 

And there’s an air of sportsmanship both on and off the “field.”

“Our team hasn’t competed in a science bowl before, so

some of our team members went and practiced with a team 

from another high school,” said Peter Eliot, of The Crucibles 

Science Club.

More than Competition at Stake

The U.S. Department of Energy began the science bowl tradition nearly 20 years ago as a way to encourage high school 

students to explore math and science. In fact, these future 

scientists, engineers and mathematicians came up with 

split second answers to questions in physics, math, biology, 

astronomy, chemistry, computers, and general sciences at the 

recent NREL-sponsored Colorado Science Bowl.

But, for those watching the friendly competition, there is more 

at stake.

“The Colorado Science Bowl provides a venue for Colorado’s 

highly achieving academic students to test their science and 

math knowledge in a fun and exciting competition,” said 

NREL’s Education Programs Coordinator Linda Lung. “We 

are hoping that once these students start college, they will consider internships and eventually employment at the Department of Energy laboratories. These students are the workforce 

of the future.”

They’ve Got Goals

The students seem to share the Department of Energy’s goal to 

see them in science careers. Across the board—from computer 

science to materials engineering—students at this year’s Colorado Science Bowl are happy to tell you what math, computer 

or sciences field they hope to pursue after graduation.

“I want to help find environmentally friendly and new ways 

to find energy,” said Arapahoe High School team captain 

Alyse White. She participated as a senior in this year’s Science Bowl on a predominately girls team, which that made 

it in to the final rounds of completion. She plans to enter the 

University of Wyoming to study courses in renewable energy 

and petroleum engineering as part of the university’s Energy 

Resource Science Undergraduate program. She’s also setting 

her sights on a future at NREL, “I’m hoping to be an intern at 

NREL and help look for new ways to find energy.”

Team Spirit and a Love of Science

White’s team from Arapahoe High School did well in the final 

rounds of the competition, but in the end it was The Crucibles 

who took home the first-place trophy. The Crucibles entered 

two teams made up of students whose love of science led 

them form their own science club in order to participate in this 

year’s Science Bowl. 

“The Crucibles Science team exemplifies the Department 

of Energy’s goal in forming this competition.” said NREL 

Education Programs Manager, Cynthia Howell. “Their team 

spirit and love of science bodes well for the future of science, 

technology, engineering and mathematics in our country.”

The Crucibles and other future scientists will converge on 

Washington, D.C., on April 30, 2009, where more than 450

students will compete for the National Science Bowl title. 

The answer to the question at the top of this story is: C) 

reflectivity. 

— Heather Lammers (Feb. 6, 2009)
A

68

SOLAR, HYDROGEN MODEL CARS

RACE TOWARD NEW ENERGY FUTURE

A fast start is everything when racing renewably fueled model cars 

at the annual statewide competition for middle school teams on 

May 16. Woodlands Academy (Castle Rock) students, cheering in 

yellow T-shirts, won first place in hydrogen fuel cell car design for 

their model “Tim the Tiny Taxi.” Credit: Jack Dempsey/PIX 16872

fter four weeks of tinkering, seven hours of racing, and 

more than a few cans of soda, it all came down to this:

Two model solar-powered race cars deadlocked at 5:23 seconds.

“There’s a tie for first place and we need to break it!’” thundered 

announcer James Bosch. “It’s time for a throw-down!’

NREL has hosted the statewide Junior Solar Sprint and Hydrogen Fuel Car Competition for 19 years, and nobody could 

remember a tighter finish than this year’s event. More than 300 

people attended the student races at Dakota Ridge High School, 

just a few miles south of Bandimere Speedway where conventional drag-racers reach 230 mph.

Students from Bell Middle School in Golden and Drake Middle 

School in Arvada crouched one more time at the top of the 

20-meter rubberized black track, tired and tense. 

Race conditions were perfect. The morning’s fog had burned off. 

The midday skies were clear and the sun was glaring. 

Ladies and Gentlemen, Lift Your Cardboard!

At the horn, the students raised the cardboard covers from their 

models’ solar panels and the cars were off ...Well, sort of.

Bell’s car #4 lived up to its nickname “Destroyer” as it zipped 

straight down the strip in 5.12 seconds—its best time of the day.

The Drake car #18 sputtered down the first 10 feet of track 

before finding its wheels again. It came in a distant second with 

a time of 10.17 seconds, or nearly twice its normal pace.

Bell’s Josh Van Laar, 13, shielded the delicate car with his oversized hooded sweatshirt as spectators rushed in celebration.

His first words reflected how edgy the competition had become.

“We won this time, right?” he wondered. Only when he saw

his teammates A.J. Nadolsky and Nate Medina did he smile.

Nadolsky described their winning car “a plank with a solar 

panel on it.” They started with a basic car kit and then experimented with different axles, gear ratios and solar panel angles. 

They added rubber bands to the wheels for traction.

“This time we ran from a dead start with the panel flat,”

Nadolsky said. “We had not done that before.”

Hydrogen Cars Faster by 25%

Competition in the hydrogen fuel cell races was nearly as tight, 

with 0.64 seconds separating the top three teams.

Manning Middle School car #41, nicknamed “Splatta,” won first 

place with a time of 5:02 seconds on a 10-meter track—half the 

length of the solar race.

The winning Manning team was one of several that the Golden 

middle school fielded. Their renewable energy model car club 

has 28 students. Students experimented with at least seven 

designs since January and repeatedly raced against each other 

to refine their design.

Unlike the solar cars, the winning time in the hydrogen car 

final was nearly two seconds slower than the best time of the 

day for a hydrogen car at 3.48 seconds. That mark was set at 10 

a.m. under cloudy, cool skies. In contrast, the winning time for a 

hydrogen car at the 2008 event was 4.63 seconds.

“As the day hot grew hotter, the density of the hydrogen 

decreased and it was escaping our tanks,” explained Manning 

science teacher Susan Coveyduck. “And, the track got hot and 

sticky.”

NREL’s Education Commitment

The Colorado competition is organized by NREL’s education program, which supports similar competitions in 29 

states nationwide. It is designed to generate enthusiasm for 

science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) skills, as 

well as extend students’ experiences with renewable energy 

technologies. 

Linda Lung, NREL’s program coordinator for the car competition, said teams often compete for three consecutive years, beginning with a simple design in 6th grade. By the time they reach 

8th grade, they have learned how to build a clean-energy racer.

Along the way, their teachers work renewable energy into the 

science curriculum, too.

“This is a wonderful engineering challenge for middle school 

students to tackle,” Lung said. “In order to meet the challenges 

of this new energy future, we want to get solar and hydrogen 

technologies into the hands of the next generation of scientists 

and energy decision makers.” 

NREL’s Junior Solar Sprint and Hydrogen Fuel Cell car competitions are sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy, Xcel 

Energy Foundation, General Motors, Jefferson County Public 

Schools, The Alliance for Sustainable Energy, LLC and NREL.

— Joseph B. Verrengia (May 22, 2009)
COMMUNITY OUTREACH

69

VETS AND ‘GRAY FIELDS’

GO GREEN WITH NREL

Graduate Steve Gutierrez smiles after completing green

energy training. He’s heading to Oklahoma to perform home

weatherization audits. Credit: Heather Lammers/PIX 16876

NREL had the honor of hosting a special and very green 

graduation ceremony. The Colorado-based Veterans Green 

Jobs (VGJ) Academy saw its first class of graduates eagerly 

take their diplomas as a first step on the road to renewed livelihoods in the green energy economy. The smiles and cheers for 

the 15 grads who successfully completed a tough eight-week 

training program were accompanied by speeches vividly lauding the new careers that these veterans had chosen.

“Veterans Green Jobs empowers military veterans to become 

leaders in the new green economy to embody a new era of shaping swords into plowshares,” VGJ Executive Director Brett KenCairn said. “Transitioning from humvees to PVs, from infrared 

rifle scopes to infrared energy cameras, from Striker Brigades 

to weatherization teams, these 15 men came from all over the 

United States and from many different personal circumstances 

because they believed in this new mission and pledged themselves to learn these new tools.”

In his commencement address, Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter praised 

the former military men for accepting new roles as environmental stewards. “When they returned home from duty, these 

gentlemen were not done serving our country. They volunteered 

again, this time, to become leaders in protecting the environment,” Ritter said.

Vets Find Green Opportunities across the United States

Graduate Steve Gutierrez served in the Marines from 1983 to 1987 

and is looking forward to another chapter in life his after working 

a variety of jobs, including construction and sales. “I thought that 

with all of my experience this is an organization I can be a part 

of,” Gutierrez said. “I find that people open up to me and can tell 

me about the issues they are having with their homes.” 

Gutierrez is one of two veterans who will be heading to 

Oklahoma to help families learn about home energy efficiency, 

specifically weatherization. Gutierrez and his fellow classmates 

are graduates of HEAT—the Home Energy Auditor Training 

program. HEAT provides the vets with training in energy surveying, auditing, energy conservation and weatherization. The 

work includes time in classroom as well as the field and lasts 

about the same time as basic training—only this program is a 

green “boot camp” where students deploy to work as energy 

auditors and new home energy rating professionals. 

The new grads will soon spread out across the country. Four 

are planning to work in New Orleans, three will help launch 

Veterans Green Corps doing forest stewardship work in the 

Southwest, and four will establish new VGJ programs in green 

buildings, energy efficiency and working with homeless veterans to replant urban forests. Graduate Joe Stepzinski, who 

served nine years in the Navy and two years in the Army, is 

heading to Georgia where he will work on decommissioning 

projects at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Savannah River 

Nuclear Site. “What I am now doing is environmental stewardship,” Stepzinski said. “Thanks to this program, I was able to 

get a great job—this concept needs to be expanded and more 

people need to be involved.”

NREL and Vets Green Jobs to Create Clean Energy

Training Center

Plans to expand the program are on the horizon. At the graduation ceremony, Gov. Ritter announced that VGJ, in collaboration with NREL Education Programs, will establish Colorado’s 

first National Training and Demonstration Center in Energy 

Efficiency. 

“This initiative will retrofit unused commercial property, for 

example, a big-box store now standing vacant on acres of empty 

parking lots,” Ritter said. “These gray fields would become green 

fields of opportunity, retraining not only veterans but other people 

who might otherwise not have access to training in green jobs.”

VGJ, NREL, and other academic partners are currently looking to 

identify unoccupied industrial and commercial property that can 

be recycled into the envisioned training center. One area currently 

under consideration is a vacant Wal-Mart in Lafayette, Colorado. 

The Wal-Mart Foundation recently awarded nearly $750,000 to 

Veterans Green Jobs to support the development of four such 

training sites. The Colorado site is seen as a potential pilot project 

that can serve as a model for other regional training facilities.

“NREL Education Programs has placed workforce development as a high priority and an important focus throughout our 

work,” NREL Education Programs Manager Cynthia Howell 

said. “We could not be more pleased to join forces with VGJ in 

developing energy efficiency training and outreach programs 

for Colorado and the nation. NREL will extend its reach locally 

and nationally as veterans and other intern ambassadors apply 

energy efficiency and conservation technologies promoted and 

developed here at our lab.”

The training centers, while focusing on immediate workforce 

development, could also be used as public demonstration and 

education centers for reuse, energy efficiency and conservation.

“Veterans tell us repeatedly that being able to serve their country through meaningful, restorative work is the most healing 

thing they could experience post combat,” KenCairn said.

— Heather Lammers (June 5, 2009)
70

LAWMAKERS VISIT NREL FOR

CLEAN ENERGY SOLUTIONS

Idaho State Rep. George Eskridge sifts through a sample of corn 

stover while listening to a presentation on cellulosic ethanol at 

the Alternative Fuels Users Facility. In the background is Tennessee 

State Rep. Jim Hackworth. Credit: Joe Verrengia/PIX 16879

More than half of the states in the U.S. have embraced 

renewable energy portfolio standards (RPS). Now comes 

the hard part—complying with those aggressive mandates and building clean energy economies during the deepest 

national recession in 70 years.

Two dozen lawmakers and legislative staffers from Maryland 

to Washington state visited NREL for three days to learn about 

clean energy technologies and market incentives. They are 

members of a special non-partisan Advisory Council on Energy 

for the National Conference of State Legislators.

State officials regulate utilities and establish laws that develop 

markets for renewable energy and energy efficiency. The briefings the council develops with NREL’s help will be distributed 

to state officials nationwide.

“The world’s big new renewable energy market is the United 

States,” NREL Director Dan Arvizu told the lawmakers. “If it 

doesn’t happen where you live and in the communities you 

represent, then it’s not going to happen. We have to find ways 

to move these technologies into the marketplace faster and differently than how we’ve done it in the past.” 

“Everything on the Table”

NREL scientists and analysts presented the lawmakers with indepth views of clean energy strategies to help their states meet 

aggressive renewable energy portfolio standards, retool their 

economies and replenish depleted state budgets—while reducing carbon emissions that threaten the Earth’s climate.

Among the programs they visited were the National Center for 

Photovoltaics, the National Wind Technology Center and windto-hydrogen storage, the National Bioenergy Center, including 

cellulosic ethanol and algae fuels research, and the VIBE virtual 

dashboard display of state and community biofuels information. 

The group also was briefed on new building design, advanced 

batteries, plug-in hybrid electric vehicles, and analytical 

capabilities and tools developed by the Strategic Energy Analysis and Applications Center. 

“The timing of this visit is perfect with the Recovery Act programs and the needs of our states,” said Kansas State Rep. Carl 

Holmes, who chairs the council. Holmes’ district in southwest 

Kansas has ethanol plants and wind farms, as well as significant transmission lines.

“If we’re going to move forward with the economy and the 

environment, we need to put everything on the table and work 

through it,” he said.

Abundant Resources, Pressing Needs

Perhaps the most compelling example is Nevada. It has a RPS 

of 25% renewable energy by 2025 and some of the nation’s best 

solar and geothermal resources. Utility-scale photovoltaic and 

concentrating solar power plants are being developed near Las 

Vegas along with existing hydropower facilities.

But the brilliantly-lit Las Vegas strip also is a symbol of the 

nation’s energy consumption and sustainability concerns. 

Nevada’s economy depends heavily on tourism—Las Vegas 

alone has 160,000 hotel rooms. Revenues are down 45% from 

two years ago, and lawmakers have both raised taxes and cut 

$1.35 billion in spending, said state Sen. Mike Schneider. He 

chairs a special state committee on energy, transportation and 

infrastructure.

Schneider said Nevada is trying to “look at the whole picture”—new utility-scale generation, research funding, workforce training and realistic industry incentives—while absorbing 

“devastating” budget cuts in social services and other programs. 

“We don’t just need renewable energy—we need to bring 

renewable energy manufacturing to Las Vegas,” Schneider said. 

“A PV plant or a wind farm is great, but they don’t employ 

many people. And once they are built, you have a lot of unemployed construction workers.”

For Most, a Portfolio of Answers

Most states have slimmer resources. For lawmakers, pursuing 

aggressive weatherization and energy efficiency programs—

along with smaller, distributed renewable power technologies—became a more appealing combination strategy.

For example, the Maryland General Assembly recently voted 

to reduce statewide energy consumption by 15% by 2015 and 

adopted a RPS of 20% by 2022. 

Maryland’s historic communities are crowded with vintage 

buildings fitted with out-dated systems in need of weatherization. Its hazy skies can’t match Nevada’s solar horsepower, but 

it has enough sunshine for effective distributed PV systems 

on residential and commercial rooftops. It also has biomass 

possibilities. 

“Now I can go to county commissions in my district and talk 

with them about new zoning and building codes that can make 

this possible,” said Maryland state delegate Sally Y. Jameson.

“I can talk to them about a solar canopy on the parking lot at 

the mall so we can generate power while we shade vehicles.” 

— Joseph B. Verrengia (June 26, 2009)
COMMUNITY OUTREACH

71

NREL SUMMER LABS SEASON 

SCIENCE STUDENTS

2009 Summer Intern Patrick Brown will head to MIT after a 

summer working in NREL’s organic solar cell lab and sharing

the results of his carbon nano-tube research.

Credit: Heather Lammers/PIX 16884

No more school, no more books... Students across the 

country routinely spend their summers avoiding anything that smacks of scholarship, but for a dedicated 

group of college and graduate students at NREL, summer is 

embraced as a time of new discoveries and learning.

In June, the National Renewable Energy 

Laboratory (NREL) welcomed participants into its 2009 summer internship 

programs. “NREL’s intern programs 

represent one of our greatest R&D 

workforce and deployment tools; these 

students become ambassadors for 

NREL’s great work,” said NREL Education Programs Manager Cynthia Howell 

said. “We open our labs to bright young 

minds who look at our research in new 

ways and bring new ideas to the table.”

NREL’s 10-week summer program is 

well known and students clamor to get into it. “Students

get to take knowledge from the classroom and apply it in a 

real-world setting,” Howell said. “At the end of each summer, 

I have numerous students tell me that they’ve learned more

in just over two months with NREL than in their first years

of college.”

As summer winds to a close, the interns present research 

results to the NREL mentors, staff, and other interns. Massachusetts Institute for Technology (MIT) undergraduate 

Jennifer Paek said her experience at NREL researching the 

use of nickel contacts on thin photovoltaic silicon wafers has 

helped further her desire to work in renewable energy. “The 

program at NREL is pretty fantastic. It’s not many labs that 

allow students to work on current problems and then give us 

the opportunity to fix them.”

In fact, the students like the program so much that some are 

repeat researchers at NREL.

Back for More

Patrick Brown is a veteran; 2009 marks his second summer 

working as an intern at NREL. “The summer after my junior 

year I looked into a number of different programs,” Brown 

said. “NREL turned out to be the best choice.”

Brown is a recent graduate of the University of Notre Dame 

and this fall will begin graduate studies at MIT. Over the last 

couple of summers at NREL, he’s been working with carbon 

nano-structures and this summer expanded his internship to 

include applying carbon nano-structures to organic solar cells. 

Brown said that being a NREL intern is educational, no matter 

how the research goes. “It’s tough to complete your project in 

10 weeks or to get as far as you want, but you get to learn from 

other scientists,” Brown said. “My results this year didn’t turn 

out the best, but I still learned a lot about the whole process.”

In 2008, Brown focused his research on using carbon nanotubes for hydrogen storage. His work was one of two NREL 

intern research projects selected through a peer-review process 

to be presented at the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s (AAAS) annual meeting in Chicago. As 

a result of being selected to present at the AAAS meeting, 

Brown’s research will be published this fall in the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Journal of Undergraduate Research. 

“This was my first chance to go to a professional conference 

and present,” Brown said. “It was a very good experience and 

I got to meet other interns from all of the 

national laboratories.”

Brown is certain his time at NREL will 

boost his academic career. “I hope to be 

working in the renewable energy field 

applying nano-technology to solar both 

in graduate school and as a post doc.”

Some Interns Set Up Shop

Besides having the opportunity to 

mentor the brightest students in

academia, NREL reaps other rewards 

from the internship program. “We are seeing more summer 

interns hired on at NREL,” said Howell. “It shows the value of 

the program and how it gives back to the lab.”

That’s just what happened for 2008 summer intern Jessica 

Olstad. In summer 2008, she was a student intern while 

attending Colorado School of Mines working toward her 

degree in chemical and biochemical engineering. It was after 

a roommate told her about a great experience at NREL that 

Olstad decided to apply. She spent her summer developing 

 “NREL’s intern programs 

represent one of our greatest 

R&D workforce and deployment 

tools; these students become 

ambassadors for NREL’s

great work.” – Cynthia Howell
72

a carbon dioxide absorbent material 

that cleans a synthesis gas. In fact, her 

research into using Lithium Zirconate 

was so successful, she also was selected to 

present her findings at the AAAS meeting in Chicago. And, like Brown, her 

final research paper will be published the 

Journal of Undergraduate Research. But, it 

turned out that her tenure with NREL was 

just beginning.

This year when Olstad heard about a job 

opening at NREL she took notice. “I jumped at the chance to 

come back,” Olstad said. “I really enjoy it here and everyone 

is great to work with.” She was recently hired as a full-time 

employee at NREL and now splits her time between analyzing biomass catalysts and working in the concentrating solar 

power program. 

“One of my ideal goals was to work in renewable energy

and change the world,” Olstad said. “I’m glad it’s ended

up that way.”

Jessica Olstad analyzes biomass particles taken

from the Thermochemical Users Facility. Once a

summer intern, she is now a full-time NREL employee.

Credit: Heather Lammers/PIX 16885

All Work and No Play?

Although learning and research are key 

goals for summer interns, getting to 

know people from all across the country 

is another bonus to being involved in the 

program. NREL summer interns network 

on various social Web sites and according 

to Brown, have planned group activities 

that focus on the Colorado outdoors such 

as camping, hiking and white water rafting. “It’s great to get to know people from 

all over, and I think many of us will stay in touch after working here,” Brown said.

This year’s interns will be able to leave NREL with more 

professional contacts than ever. This year’s summer class was 

the largest in NREL’s history with 80 undergrads, graduate 

students, and postdoctoral students. While the summer season 

marks a peak in internship program participation, a variety of 

programs run year-round:

•	 DOE’s Science Undergraduate Laboratory Internship

Program (SULI)

•	 Community College Institute (CCI) for Science and

Technology sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy 

Office of Science and the American Association of

Community Colleges

•	 DOE Pre-Service Teacher (PST) Internship Program

•	 NREL’s Research Participant Program where university students have the opportunity to participate in the laboratory’s 

research and development programs, initiate new areas of 

research, and establish a base for ongoing collaborations.

“Of course, this program would not be possible without the 

full support of NREL, DOE’s Office of Science and the amazing scientists and staff here at NREL,” Howell said.

— Heather Lammers (Aug. 7, 2009)

“One of my ideal goals

was to work in renewable 

energy and change the 

world. I’m glad it’s ended 

up that way.” – Jessica Olstad 
COMMUNITY OUTREACH

73

NREL ENERGY EXECS MAKE

AN IMPACT NATIONALLY

2009 Energy Execs participants pose for a photo a atop the 

Denver Museum of Nature & Science while on a field trip to

learn about this class project which grabbed national attention.

Credit: Heather Lammers/PIX 16887

T

he National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) is no 

stranger to the spotlight when it comes to the discussion 

of renewable energy solutions for the country. But now 

alumni from the NREL Executive Energy Leadership program 

(Energy Execs) are also finding themselves in the national 

spotlight for their energy saving ways.

Energy Execs is a six-month leadership program that gives 

executives an in-depth look at solar and wind power, biofuels 

and transportation, and energy efficient building technologies. Participants get first hand briefings by NREL technology 

experts, visit research laboratories as well as visit working 

applications of renewable energy technologies in the field. At 

the end of the program, participants demonstrate what they’ve 

learned by presenting a viable project on renewable energy or 

energy efficiency.

Energy Exec Project Garners Presidential Visit

The 2009 class got to walk in the footsteps of President Obama 

when they toured the 100 kilowatt solar array atop the Denver 

Museum of Nature & Science (DMNS). In February, Obama 

selected the museum as the location where he signed the 

American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) into law. 

Just before the ceremony, Obama, along with Vice President 

Joe Biden and Namaste Solar CEO Blake Jones, walked among 

the solar panels that showed green energy in practice at the 

museum. While Namaste solar was recognized for installing 

the roof-top solar panels, what wasn’t publicized was that the 

solar array was the final project for 2007 Energy Exec grad 

Dave Noel.

“The people at NREL inspired me to push the envelope,” Dave 

Noel, DMNS vice president of operations, said. “It helped me 

become a lot more aggressive with what I wanted to do at the 

museum.” 

“I came into the program as an engineer with a different 

perspective than others,” he said. “I looked at it as a great 

opportunity for some technical knowledge, but it was a pretty 

broadening experience and eye opening to see the related 

policy issues.”

In addition to completing the rooftop solar project at the 

museum, Noel said the program inspired him to expand his 

renewable energy knowledge to other projects. The DMNS is 

in the process of constructing a 100,000 sq foot addition to its 

exhibit space. Noel is steering the expansion toward LEED®

Platinum status from the U.S. Green Building Council and is 

working toward a zero carbon footprint for the new addition.

“One of the biggest things I took away from the program is 

that I now have great contacts,” Noel said. “I know that if 

there is something I’m trying to figure out, there’s someone I 

can talk to.”

Tapping Solar in Portland

Another company that is reaping the benefits of having its 

employees attend the NREL Energy Execs program is ProLogis. ProLogis is headquartered in Denver and provides 

industrial warehouse and distribution space across the globe. 

ProLogis has 475 million square feet of this type of space 

which means it is one of the largest owners of roof space in 

the world. This vast amount of roof space is what got Drew 

Torbin, director of global renewable energy for the company, 

thinking when he participated in the 2007 Energy Execs program and is why his colleague, Matt Singleton, vice president 

for new development, was a member of the 2009 class.

“The timing was great; I saw a press release for this program 

just as we were putting together an internal team that would 

focus on renewable energy projects,” Torbin said. “We saw 

renewable energy as valuable and something we should be 

spending our time on.” 

According to Torbin, even though the company had received 

a variety of ideas and offers for ways to use their roofs across 

the globe—from large movie posters to cell phone towers—the 

company held out for the right project.

“We wanted focus on creating value from our existing assets 

and our roofs and our buildings are perfect for solar,” said 

Torbin. The large, flat roofs make them ideal for rooftop photovoltaic (PV) systems, and their locations near major population centers make good host sites from which to generate and 

export energy back into the electric grid. 

Exporting power from installation sites on ProLogis roofs ultimately creates the greatest impact. While it would be possible 

for ProLogis’ customers inside these distribution centers to use 

the energy produced, they wouldn’t come close to using all of 

it. The main use for ProLogis’ industrial space is storage and 

distribution, and although the buildings are large, their energy 

consumption is small, since the buildings typically contains 

racks upon racks of merchandise and are not air conditioned. 
74

One of Torbin’s recent accomplishments at ProLogis also doubled as his Energy Execs final project, which focused on working with Portland General Electric to install thin film solar 

panels on three ProLogis warehouses in Portland, Oregon The 

1.1-megawatt solar project is currently the largest thin film PV 

installation in the Northwest.

But, ProLogis hasn’t stopped there. Team members also have 

worked with Southern California Edison in California to 

complete a 2.4-megawatt installation—which at the time of 

installation was the largest single rooftop solar installation in 

the United States. In total, the company currently has 10 PV 

projects completed in three continents, resulting in just over 

6 megawatts of solar power. These 10 ProLogis PV projects 

occupy roughly 3 million square feet of roof space. Torbin 

lightheartedly pointed out that the company has roughly 470 

million square feet of roof to go.

“What has really helped us in terms of NREL’s Energy Execs 

program was being able to get out and see the technology as 

well as take advantage of the people and speakers that are 

introduced to us,” said Singleton. “We have found the Energy 

Execs program to be such a great value that we believe NREL 

could easily charge participants to be in the program.” 

NREL Benefits, Too

2009 marked the third year for the Energy Execs program with 

a record 31 participants. In 2008, 19 representatives of industry, local government, and non-profit organizations completed 

the program. The executives’ final projects show the success 

of a program, which in the long run helps NREL technologies 

make it to the marketplace.

“The NREL Executive Energy Leadership Program offers an 

important opportunity for community leaders to embrace 

clean energy technologies,” NREL Director Dan Arvizu said. 

“Moving these technologies to the marketplace at speed 

and scale requires well thought-out systems and grassroots 

implementation. Given the increasing interest in our leadership program, I’m confident NREL is on the right path in 

helping statewide leaders gain access to our important work 

accelerating clean energy technologies. Energy Execs alumni 

are emerging as shining stars on the statewide and national 

energy scene.”

2009 Executive Energy Leadership Program

Participants

•	 Tom Acre - Deputy City Manager, City of Commerce City

•	 Matthew Appelbaum - Mayor, City of Boulder

•	 Sharon Barrett - Senior Director, Cushman & Wakefield

•	 Karen Benker - Mayor Pro Tem, City of Longmont

•	 Jim Benson - City Council Member, City of Commerce City

•	 Bruce Biggi - Economic Development Manager,

City of Greeley

•	 James Bosch - Visitors Program/National Bioenergy

Center, NREL

•	 Steve Catanach - Light & Power Manager, City of

Fort Collins

•	 Bob Churchwell - City Administrator, City of Burlington

•	 Peter Dawson - County Commissioner/Chair, Baca County

•	 Frances Draper - Executive Director, Boulder Economic 

Council

•	 Keith Fife - Long Range Planning Division Director,

Mesa County

•	 Robert FitzGerald - City Council Member/Mayor Pro Tem, 

City of Aurora

•	 John Hall - Business Development Officer, Office of

Economic Development - City of Westminster

•	 Stephen Hall - Executive Director, Western TechSet

•	 Anne Hayes - Vice President, Westfield Company

•	 Michael Kirk - Director of Facilities Services,

Larimer County

•	 Irene Pérez Law – Chief Operating Officer American Solar 

Energy Society

•	 Michael Masciola - Vice President, Northern Colorado

Economic Development Corporation

•	 Lisa Nolder - Economic Development Director, Southeast 

Colorado Business, Retention, Expansion & Attraction 

(SEBREA)

•	 David November - Environmental Manager, Keystone & 

Breckenridge Resorts (Vail Resorts)

•	 Susan Osborne - City Council Member, City of Boulder

•	 Frank Phillips - City Council Member, City of Lafayette

•	 Scott Prestidge - Senate Staff, Colorado Senator Mark Udall

•	 Scott Randall - Town Manager, Town of Superior

•	 Kathleen Seelye - Managing Partner, Ricca Newmark Design

•	 Greg Severance - Director of Public Works, Pueblo County

•	 Matthew Singleton - Vice President, Project Management, 

Prologis

•	 Christopher Smith - Program Manager, Denver Office of 

Economic Development

•	 Virgil Turner - Administrative Services Director, City of 

Montrose

•	 Debra Wilcox - Vice President, Biofuels Project Manager,

Bye Energy, Inc.

— Heather Lammers (Sept. 4, 2009)
COMMUNITY OUTREACH

75

IT TAKES A SOLAR VILLAGE

Team Germany’s winning “Cube House” featured silicon and

thin-film solar panels on all visible sides of the house. The 

design’s solar panel operates a toy on the front porch of the 

home. Credit: Stefano Paltera/U.S. Department of Energy Solar Decathlon/PIX 16893

R

ain usually spoils a solar power contest. But three days

of showers—and thin-film photovoltaic technology—

actually helped Team Germany win the 2009 U.S. Department of Energy’s Solar Decathlon.

Team Germany’s Cube House was one 

of the most technologically advanced 

among the 20 clean energy prototype 

designs on the National Mall. Every 

exposed face of the building was covered 

with power-generating panels.

On the roof: a 11.1-kW photovoltaic (PV) 

system of 40 monocrystalline silicon 

panels. On the sides: 250 thin-film panels 

that look like glossy clapboards. The 

thin films used copper-indium-galliumdiselenide layers, or CIGS.

The combination system was expected to 

produce 200% of the energy needed by 

the house. The thin-film panels, while less efficient than conventional silicon, were projected to perform better in cloudy 

weather than silicon.

Team Germany got its proof on the competition’s fifth day 

when skies turned slate gray and a cold rain splattered the 

solar village. By late afternoon, as federal commuters started 

streaming home and electricity demand throughout the city 

began climbing, the Team Germany house was producing 

12.68 kW and consuming 12.33 kW, for a net export of .35 kW.

Team Illinois’ house finished a close second, emphasizing 

energy efficiency over power production.

“Team Germany built a gingerbread house packed with solar 

panels,” said Richard King, DOE Solar Decathlon director. “In 

the rain, the thin-film panels were making electricity. It made 

the difference.”

NREL Manages the Decathlon

NREL has managed the biannual Solar Decathlon for DOE 

since the contest’s inception in 2001. Selection of the 20 university teams from North America and Europe begins two years 

before the actual competition. 

The laboratory sent 30 people to run the week-long contest 

on the National Mall, including installation of the homes with 

trucks and cranes, connecting them to Washington’s municipal 

power grid, running the judged contests, and monitoring the 

homes’ continual performance.

NREL senior engineer Byron Stafford has managed the 

Decathlon’s technical systems since its inception. Jamming his 

floppy blue beach hat over his ears and sloshing through deep 

muddy puddles, Stafford made a beeline for the Team Germany house to confirm the data his equipment was reporting. 

“I can’t believe they are net exporting in this weather!” Stafford said. “That’s totally cool. It’s reflective of where the world 

has gone.”

Glowing with Grid-Connected Power 

Inside the Cube House, a wall-mounted control panel showed 

each side of the house and the roof glowing with power 

production, even as digital readouts showed appliances and 

the climate system consuming power by the second. Team 

Germany was relaxing around the dining 

room table in shirtsleeves, relying on 

dim natural twilight seeping through 

windows. 

“Every 15 minutes I check our systems 

and what the other homes are doing,” 

Team Germany electrical engineer 

Andreas Schreiber explained. “Today 

the light is indirect, so every side of the 

house is making power.”

Being grid-connected and exporting 

power was the most notable change in 

the 2009 contest. In previous years, the 

homes’ solar panels charged batteries to 

power the homes’ lighting and appliances.

NREL’s Sara Farrar-Nagy, who is the Decathlon’s project

manager, compared the event to building a new high-tech 

subdivision overnight in one of the world’s most iconic

and supervised locations—between the U.S. Capitol and the

Washington Monument and across from the Smithsonian

Institution’s “Castle” headquarters.

“Team Germany built a 

gingerbread house packed 

with solar panels. In the rain, 

the thin-film panels were 

making electricity. It made

the difference.” – Richard King
76

Complicating the laboratory’s efforts was the local utility’s 

older transmission network that, like most municipal power 

grids, was established decades ago to deliver power to customers, but it was not built for two-way power flows. 

“One house pushing power back onto the grid is no big deal,” 

Farrar-Nagy said. “But on sunny days this week, all of the 

homes were exporting power. It was a quirky challenge. Building a grid-connected contest is a real accomplishment.”

Real World, Zero Energy

In the Decathlon, 20 teams of college and university students 

compete to design, build, and operate the most attractive, 

effective, and energy-efficient solar-powered house. 

In addition to educating the next generation of renewable 

energy engineers, architects, and green builders, the Solar 

Decathlon is intended to propel solar 

energy and energy efficient products 

into the marketplace and to demonstrate to the potential of zero energy 

homes.

Some of the homes in the competition 

already have been sold or donated for 

public and private use. The Rice University “ZeRow House” is scheduled to 

be relocated to that city’s Third Ward in 

cooperation with Project Row House, a 

non-profit.

The Rice House finished eighth in the 

competition, but at about $200,000, it 

cost one-quarter of the Team Germany’s winning design. It 

emphasizes skylights over windows and reduces the house’s 

total energy use for lighting fixtures to the equivalent of three 

100-watt light bulbs. The PV system is rated at 4.2 kW—a fraction of the German system, but is appropriately sized for the 

expected load of the house.

“The Rice team did amazing things with limited lighting and 

no windows on three sides,” Farrar-Nagy said. “It’s a testament to what is possible. A real family is going to live in that 

house in Houston.”

Today’s Students Explore Their Future Homes

More than 200,000 people visited Decathlon homes in 2009—

including Energy Secretary Steven Chu, members of Congress 

and other dignitaries, as well as thousands of schoolchildren. 

Even on rainy days, visitors with umbrellas waited for 30 

minutes outside each of the homes.

Parkland Middle Magnet School of Rockville, Maryland, 

closed for a day so it could send all 700 of its students to tour 

the Decathlon homes. The students split into small groups 

to interview university team hosts and complete homework 

assignments.

The middle school students were drawn to the prominent flatscreen TVs, sliding room dividers, and touchpad controls for 

lighting and climate systems. Predictably, they skipped past 

the energy-efficient laundry centers.

At the Ohio State University house, students pointed to juxtaposition of centuryold reclaimed barn siding with new silicon 

solar panels that are not encased in a sealed 

frame. With the backside of the panels 

exposed, sunlight reflects off the home’s 

white roof to the cells and generates up to 

4% additional power.

“When I grow up I think this is going to

be like my college dorm room,” said Joi 

Rice, 11.

“I like this house because I can watch the 

TV while I’m in bed,” said Andy Zhang, 12.

“The California house, because it was more spacious,”

said Sayer Sampson, 12. “I think it looks better.”

“I already live in a small home so this would be OK,”

said Lilly Diaz, 11. “I like the touch pads.”

2009 Solar Decathlon House Rules

•	 Maintain an average indoor temperature of 72°F–76°F 

(22°C–24°C) 

•	 Maintain humidity of 40–55%.

•	 800 square feet

•	 Wash and dry 10 loads of laundry during the contest

•	 Operate refrigerator and freezer between 40° and -5°F.

•	 Run dishwasher during contest

•	 Run the television 6 hours per day

•	 Cook and host an evening dinner party.

— Joseph B. Verrengia (Oct. 16, 2009)

“The Rice team did amazing 

things with limited lighting 

and no windows on three 

sides. It’s a testament to 

what is possible. A real family 

is going to live in that house 

in Houston.” – Sara Farrar-Nagy
E

“

COMMUNITY OUTREACH

77

GENERATION-Y START-UP STUNS 

NREL GROWTH FORUM

Judges mark their scorecards after an entrepreneur’s presentation at the 22nd Industry Growth Forum. The forum featured 32 

competitive presentations by start-up companies seeking financing. The judges were from private investment and clean energy 

firms. Credit: Pat Corkery/PIX 16897

covative won the NREL Growth Forum!”

Fingers flying on his cell phone, Ecovative Design co-founder 

Eben Bayer was tweeting news of his start-up’s stunning 

victory at NREL’s 22nd Clean Energy Growth Forum even as 

potential investors were circling him at the awards banquet 

and slipping business cards under his 

dessert plate.

Bayer and Ecovative co-founder 

Gavin McIntyre make organic, 

compostable insulation and shipping 

packaging made from fungal mycelium—billions of threadlike mushroom roots—and agricultural wastes 

such as rice hulls and cotton gin trash. 

Their bio-manufacturing process uses 

about 10 times less energy per unit 

of material than the manufacture of 

synthetic foams using fossil fuels. 

And unlike other green packaging, 

their product can be custom-molded 

while also offering thermal protection. 

“Winning the NREL growth forum is very important validation of our product and our company,” said the 24-year old 

Bayer, whose Generation-Y business was incubated while he 

and McIntire were students at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute 

in upstate New York. “It changes how we are perceived by 

investors and the clean energy industry.”

Forum Raises $2.5 Billion

NREL’s 2009 Clean Energy Industry Growth Forum attracted 

nearly 600 investors, entrepreneurs, scientists, and policymakers. Since 2003, more than $2.5 billion has been raised by 

companies presenting at the forum.

The three-day conference highlighted clean energy industry 

technology and business developments. The forum featured 

new programs such as seminars on partnering with the laboratory in research and commercialization agreements, as well 

as a “speed dating” format that helped entrepreneurs briefly 

meet with many potential investors.

In opening remarks, NREL Director Dan Arvizu directly challenged forum participants to compete differently in the clean 

energy marketplace.

China, India, Brazil, and other nations already are embracing existing renewable energy technologies both as a source 

of carbon-free power and economic growth, while the United 

States has slipped behind many nations in clean energy generation and manufacturing.

Jobs and growth must come from the next generation of clean 

energy technologies that NREL is helping to both develop and 

commercialize, Director Arvizu said.

“China is particularly alarming,” he told the forum. “Of the 

top 10 photovoltaic companies in the world, five are in China. 

They are manufacturing technologies that were developed 

here in very high volumes.

“We need to approach energy differently and the key will 

be innovation. This forum brings together the clean energy 

innovators, investors, and policymakers needed to bring about 

transformational change.” 

Hundreds of Applicants,

Three Winners

At the forum, 34 companies were selected 

from 285 applicants to present their business plans to panels of judges. Three firms 

won 2009 Clean Energy Venture Awards 

sponsored by NREL and Deutsche Bank 

Climate Change Advisors. 

Cash prizes include $10,000 for Best Venture 

and $5,000 each for the two Outstanding 

Ventures. NREL provides the winners with 

in-kind commercialization support matching the cash award to help increase their 

chances of commercial success. 

Ecovative Design of Green Island, New 

York, took the top prize as the Best Venture.

Exro Technologies of West Vancouver, British Columbia, 

Canada, won an Outstanding Venture award for its unique 

electrical generator capable of delivering double-digit 

increases to the annual kilowatt hours produced out of a wind 

turbine, or tidal and current turbines, without increasing 

“We need to approach energy 

differently and the key will 

be innovation. This forum 

brings together the clean 

energy innovators, investors, 

and policymakers needed to 

bring about transformational 

change.” – Dan Arvizu
78

capital costs. Exro has raised $2.5 million and is seeking 

another $10 million in outside financing.

Evolutionary Genomics of Lafayette, 

Colorado, also won an Outstanding 

Venture award for developing and 

successfully patenting a cost-effective 

technology to identify key genes that 

control fundamental biofuel plant and 

algae traits. Evolutionary Genomics 

was recognized at the 2008 forum. 

The firm has raised $7.7 million and is 

seeing another $3 million in Series B 

financing.

Promising Innovations,

Difficult Economy

Presentations of promising clean energy technologies were 

balanced by sobering comments by some of clean energy’s 

most prominent investors. 

The global recession has reduced large institutional investors in the sector from 16 in 2007 to just six in 2009. Private 

investors told the forum they are seeking deeper and more 

detailed information from start-ups because their portfolios 

have shrunk and their margin for investment error has been 

erased. Even solar projects in the desert southwest are having 

difficulty finding financing right now, they said.

Yet demand for renewable energy technologies remains high, 

with backlogs for wind turbines, solar panels, and related 

equipment running as high as two years in some cases.

And, two-thirds of the 50 U.S. states have adopted renewable 

energy portfolio standards and other policies to establish clean 

energy markets over the next two decades.

“Just as the renewable energy industry was growing for the 

first time, we fell off a cliff,” said Jeffery Leonard, CEO of the 

Global Environmental Fund. “But the key government mandates will change markets. There is a revolution going on.”

The recession’s hangover could be felt during the company 

presentations, as panels of judges sharply questioned entrepreneurs about their revenue projections, potential competitors 

and manufacturing risks. Companies 

that came to the forum less prepared 

may have left disappointed. But even 

award winners such as Ecovative’s 

Bayer said the judges’ cross-examination “really bored into the details” of 

his company.

“They all were sitting there very 

straight-faced and I definitely didn’t 

feel as if I was nailing it,” said Bayer. 

So far, his company has received $1.15 

million in grants and awards. He is 

seeing $3.65 million in early stage 

financing to build a scalable manufacturing plant closer to 

agricultural feedstock sources.

“One of the judges was incredibly knowledgeable about Styrofoam manufacturing,” Bayer said, with a weary shake of his 

head. “Our technology is disruptive and we have to prove that 

our product is 1,000% better.”

— Joseph B. Verrengia (Nov. 6, 2009)

Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter, left, and NREL Director Dan Arvizu field 

questions about the clean energy economy at the 22nd Industry 

Growth Forum in Denver. The forum is organized by the laboratory.

Credit: Pat Corkery/PIX 16898

“Just as the renewable energy 

industry was growing for the first 

time, we fell off a cliff. But the key 

government mandates will change 

markets. There is a revolution 

going on.” – Jeffery Leonard

National Renewable Energy Laboratory

1617 Cole Boulevard, Golden, Colorado 80401-3305

303-275-3000 • www.nrel.gov

NREL is a national laboratory of the U.S. Department of Energy

Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy 

Operated by the Alliance for Sustainable Energy, LLC

NREL/MK-6A4-47428 • January 2010

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