Renewable Energy at Sandia

sandia provides exceptional service in the national interest for almost half a century one component of this mission has been our renewable energy program the more than 100 researchers in our program do fundamental and applied research that reduces the cost improves the resilience and reliability and decreases the regulatory burden of renewable energy our research builds on many of sandia's core strengths including high fidelity modeling materials development analysis and testing advanced control systems high temperature and high pressure systems robotics machine learning and artificial intelligence high performance computing and system and component performance testing and reliability using these strengths sandia's research has made major contributions to the nation's energy security and resilience economic viability and environmental sustainability pcell is a seven acre facility that is currently focused on performing reliability and performance assessments of photovoltaic system technologies [Music] it's a very interdisciplinary group and that really is an advantage when you're talking about as complicated a problem as solar energy everybody has different areas of expertise and we can all work together to solve some very complicated problems that way there's no one place that has the full range of capabilities that that we have we host about approximately a thousand modules of various different technologies [Music] you know our goals are really to try to understand how these technologies perform in the environment what influences how long they could last and their durability their reliability it's really a special place both in terms of the scale of the systems research that we do as well as the depth that we can go into module characterization we are the geothermal research department and programs and what we are interested in is subsurface access and anything that's related to that we're always engaged in prototyping new technologies to enable new capability within geothermal industry there's several organizations i think around the world that have the knowledge to access the subsurface that's not unique i think what is unique is the ability to access and manipulate such a harsh subsurface you know the harshest of the harsh i think that's unique sandia has enormous capability to support geothermal research and we have done that for decades there's always a new problem there's always a different challenge to address and we're solving some of the hardest problems our country is facing at the end of the day it's really about making geothermal energy accessible at a lower cost to everybody this facility provides really niche in our experimental capability to help providers grab more energy from the wind using the turbines and the systems they have we're one of a kind world world class facility and i i don't say that easily our small size and small team is is really what what makes us nimble although we only have three turbines these turbines are are heavily instrumented our researchers are incredibly talented in a number of areas vertical axis wind turbines horizontal axis wind turbines aero elasticity aerodynamics just just a ton of talent it's exciting to me that the work we do here helps on the front end of the wind farm from siding the best places to locate the wind farms all the way through the operation the tail end getting getting the most bang for the buck out of these wind plants with it once they're in full operation so it really is um to me key to the continued growth of not just wind but renewable energy the real magic is finding the efficiency grabbing more energy from the air sandia national laboratories was one of the seminal laboratories that helped invent the technology of concentrating solar power this group pioneered the technology and paved the way for immense amounts of progress beginning in the 1980s and continuing through today there are no power towers like this it is a research power tower it's not a commercial and we are able to do a lot of configurations at this unique research facility that can be done nowhere else in the world we have a solar power tower featuring 218 heliostats we also have a solar furnace a solar simulator and many other test capabilities that can test very high flux levels up to 600 watts per centimeter squared and can test temperatures on materials up to as high as 2000 to 3000 degrees celsius we believe that the work that we do here will make a difference in the world whether it be energy and climate security as well as other global security challenges we all need to pull together to solve the problems that we face and create a bright future this is one piece of the puzzle a majority of the population of the earth lives near the ocean they're literally living right next to this energy source water power is essentially taking the energy that's in the motion of the ocean and converting it in some useful useful way sandia is actually involved in a lot of wave power believe it or not even though we're in the middle of a desert because of our unique capabilities in engineering materials and modeling tools i think that's our major contribution technology transfer from completely seemingly unrelated fields being transferred into wave power we were able to make fixed steps forward in the water power technology because of that the numerical modeling the the prediction the virtual laboratories that we and the facilities that we have are world class we can create models that are specific to this industry and tools that the industry can use we're helping our community get these technologies into the water but also we're also helping our community generate electricity in a way that hasn't been done before you

Channel: Sandia National Labs

Views: 7,153

Keywords: Sandia National Laboratories, pv, geothermal energy, waterpower, wind energy, csp, photovoltaic

Id: Vqs6wxqaV_s

Length: 6min 39sec (399 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 09 2021