NREL Expert Honored for Energy Systems Innovations

The Energy Department’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) recently won several prestigious awards, including honors for innovations in window air-conditioning efficiency, data sharing, and its energy-efficient computer data center.

Dr. Ben Kroposki, director of Energy Systems Integration at NREL, has been named an IEEE Fellow, recognized for his leadership in renewable and distributed energy systems integration in the electric power sector. Kroposki has led a number of efforts over the last 20 years that have contributed to the advancement of renewable and distributed energy systems.

Kroposki conducted original research that led to several IEEE standards in photovoltaic performance and reliability. He also led several efforts with IEEE interconnection standards and chaired IEEE 1547.4, which was the first international standard on microgrids. In 2007, Kroposki was asked by the Energy Department to lead a study that examined the state of technical and analytical challenges that must be addressed to enable high penetration levels of distributed renewable energy technologies. The study, called “Renewable System Interconnection,” consists of 15 reports that address a variety of issues related to distributed systems technology development, advanced distribution systems integration, technical and market analysis, regulatory implementation and more.

Kroposki has also been directly involved with IEEE publications and serves on the editorial boards of both IEEE Journal of Photovoltaics and IEEE Transactions of Sustainable Energy. He has also served as the guest editor for four issues of IEEE Power & Energy Magazine on solar energy and energy systems integration.

At NREL, Kroposki leads NREL’s strategic research efforts in the design and performance optimization of energy systems at all scales. His expertise is in the design and testing of renewable and distributed power systems and grid integration. He has more than 100 publications in these areas. Kroposki received his bachelors’ and master’s degrees in electrical engineering from Virginia Tech and Ph.D. from the Colorado School of Mines.

NREL analyst Morgan Bazilian has been named to the Board of Energy Research and Social Science, a new academic journal dedicated to examining the relationship between energy systems and society. The journal aims to cover topics around the intersection of energy technologies, fuels, and resources on one side, and social processes and influences on the other.

Bazilian is deputy executive director of the NREL-based Joint Institute for Strategic Energy Analysis (JISEA), which seeks to support the transformation of the global economy through trans-disciplinary research focused on the nexus of energy, finance, and society. Bazilian is also a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Advisory Council, and also recently was named to the Japan Renewable Energy Foundation’s Innovation Network. The network exchanges information and proposals geared toward the evolution of Japan and the world into a sustainable society based on renewable energy.

The editors of HPCwire magazine, which covers the world of high-performance computing, honored NREL’s efforts in energy efficient computing with one of its Editors’ Choice Awards. The award goes to NREL, as well as to Asetek and Aspen Systems, for working together to retrofit an air-cooled cluster to an extremely energy-efficient liquid cooled system. The system is housed in NREL’s new Energy Systems Integration Facility.

The NREL data center uses an innovative hot water, direct-to-chip, data center liquid cooling technology that removes heat from the central processing units, graphics processing units, memory modules and other hot spots within the servers. The all-liquid path captures heat from the servers to be reused to heat the facility in cold weather.

The awards were presented at the 2013 International Conference for High Performance Computing Networking, Storage and Analysis in Denver.

DOE’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy recently honored NREL with two of its top awards in its first-ever Housing Innovation Awards. The awards recognize the best in energy efficient building technologies for commercial facilities and residential homes.

NREL won in the category of Advanced Technologies and Practices for its development of ways to significantly improve real-world energy use by window air conditioners. The recommendations NREL developed from its laboratory findings have been published as a homeowner’s guide for better window installation. NREL researchers say the tips should result in 5% to 10% cooling energy savings – enough to pay for the air conditioner over its lifetime. If all window air conditioners were improved in this way, the nation’s energy use could be reduced by 40 trillion Btu per year, saving consumers $400 million each year.

In the same category, NREL won for its contributions to development of Home Performance eXtensible Markup Language (HPXML), a standard data definition for building and efficiency measure information.