
The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) has updated its Advanced Research on Integrated Energy Systems (ARIES) platform to simulate hydropower and marine energy resources.
The platform, introduced in 2020, can create 3D simulations of entire power grids — either existing or theoretical — that contain thousands or even millions of different energy technologies. But until now, hydropower and marine energy were not well represented, NREL said.
“Now that we can use ARIES to simulate hydropower, we can study more scenarios in more locations and even potential future energy systems,” said Jerry Davis, the laboratory program manager for ARIES. “We want to represent as many renewable generation sources as we can.”
NREL argues that ARIES is especially valuable for hydropower. Researchers can install real-world, small-scale, experimental solar panels or wind turbines at laboratory field sites and study them there. However, hydropower plants are “simply too big and specific to certain river sites or geography,” NREL contends.
Instead, researchers at NREL built what they call a Real-Time Hydropower Emulation Platform, which can mimic real-world hydropower facilities in real-time. Now, their 2.5-megawatt emulator uses data from actual hydropower plants to inform its simulations.
To demonstrate the usefulness of the platform, NREL pointed to the remote village of Cordova, Alaska, which saw its microgrid strained by a 400% increase in energy demand from fishers in the area. The microgrid is also vulnerable to Alaska’s cold winters and extreme weather events like avalanches and droughts. Cordova needed a change, but as NREL notes, it couldn’t afford to alter its microgrid and risk blackouts or damage.
The village was one of the first communities to directly benefit from ARIES’ hydropower emulation platform, NREL said, and ARIES will soon be able to connect to actual hardware, like a hydropower generator, to these virtual simulations so that the system can receive live feedback from the tech and learn from it.
Additionally, some communities may have large amounts of water suitable for marine energy development, but they likely lack the confidence that the technologies can deliver on their promise. This is where ARIES comes in, NREL said.
At NREL, researchers are studying marine energy technologies “to make sure that things don’t fail in the field,” said Kumaraguru Prabakar, a research engineer at the laboratory. “Even if a small river generator is powering a small house, it is powering the grid, so you have to make sure it’s safe.”
NREL is working to assess how variables like river freezes, droughts, and unpredictable long-term wave generation can impact different power systems, and whether other solutions, like energy storage, could balance out the fluctuations.