Enabling Innovation In The Energy System Transition

Innovation in the electric sector has the potential to drive job growth, decrease environmental impacts, reduce rate payer costs, and increase reliability and resiliency. However, the traditional electric system was built to deliver a controlled flow of energy from a centralized location with maximum reliability and minimum cost. As both customer expectations and generation technologies change, new avenues for grid innovation are being explored. Residential customers, commercial and industrial clients, and electric utilities must all find a way to balance goals for decarbonization and social justice with maintaining a least cost, reliable power grid. Grounded in Geel’s energy system transition framework, this dissertation explores how each of these three stakeholder groups is navigating the transition to renewables. The first study tests the idea that residential customers will be more inclined to change their behavior when altruistically contributing to a greater goal. Renewed Darwinian theory was explored to question the exclusive use of financial incentives in demand response programs, with evidence that enabling altruism may influence electricity demand even more effectively than traditional financial incentives. A difference in differences approach was designed to test the impact of the Burlington Electric Department’s Defeat the Peak program on residential energy use where the incentive was a group donation to a local charity. Results suggest utility savings of over $12 in energy supply costs for every$1 they invested in the program. Financial levers, however, can be quite effective in influencing electricity demand, and may result in cost-shifting from high to low demand consumers. The second study focused on rate design for commercial and industrial customers through an analysis of the utility demand charge. For over a century the demand charge has been a primary means to recover total cost-of-service including fixed, embedded, and overhead costs. Under the current system, most small commercial and residential customers do not receive a strong direct price signal to invest in storage, load shifting, or renewables. Larger commercial and industrial customers exercise some measure of control over their loads to reduce demand charges, but with only modest benefit or value to the system as a whole. The system costs are then redistributed to all customer classes, potentially falling disproportionately on low demand customers. To investigate, a regression analysis was conducted with cost and market characteristics from 447 US electric utilities. Results suggest that demand charges predict a significant degree of variability in residential pricing, confirming suspected cost shifting. Redesigning the demand charge could open up new markets for renewable energy entrepreneurs and lower grid costs and customer rates, supporting goals of decarbonization while also achieving reliable least-cost power. In the third study, an iterative approach was employed to understand why some utilities lean into the energy system transition while others take a more conservative stance. A database of 170 US electric utilities was constructed including a qualitative assessment of Integrated Resource Plans for renewability orientation. Institutional resource-based theory was utilized to take a striated approach to understanding firm heterogeneity, identifying factors at the individual manager level, firm level, and external environment that can influence a utility’s energy supply characteristics. Independent variables in a simultaneous regression analysis included CEO gender and tenure at the individual level, ownership structure and firm age at the firm level, and the impact of policies and state rurality at the inter-firm level. Results indicate that a significant amount of a utility’s commitment to the renewable energy transition can be predicted based on these firm characteristics

Open-Source, Open-Architecture SoftwarePlatform for Plug-InElectric Vehicle SmartCharging in California

This interdisciplinary eXtensible Building Operating System–Vehicles project focuses on controlling plug-in electric vehicle charging at residential and small commercial settings using a novel and flexible open-source, open-architecture charge communication and control platform. The platform provides smart charging functionalities and benefits to the utility, homes, and businesses.This project investigates four important areas of vehicle-grid integration research, integrating technical as well as social and behavioral dimensions: smart charging user needs assessment, advanced load control platform development and testing, smart charging impacts, benefits to the power grid, and smart charging ratepayer benefits

Integrated Scenario-Based Methodology for Project Risk Management

Project risk management is currently used in several industries and mandated by government acquisition agencies around the world to manage uncertainty in an effort to improve a project's probability of success. Common practice involves developing a list of risk items scored with probability and consequence ordinal scales by committee usually focusing on cost and schedule issues. A scenario based process modeling construct is introduced using a hybrid Probabilistic Risk Assessment and Decision Analysis framework integrating project development risks with operational system risks. Project management's decisions are explicitly modeled and ranked based on risk importance to the project. Multiple consequence attributes are unified providing a basis for computing total project risk. This study shows that such an approach leads to an analysis system where scenarios tracing risk items to many possible consequences are explicitly understood; the interaction between cost, schedule, and performance models drive the analysis; probabilities for overruns, delays, increased system hazards are determined directly; and state-of-the-art quantification techniques are directly applicable. All these enhance project management's capability to respond with more effective decisions

Langley aerospace test highlights, 1985

The role of the Langley Research Center is to perform basic and applied research necessary for the advancement of aeronautics and space flight, to generate new and advanced concepts for the accomplishment of related national goals, and to provide research advice, technological support, and assistance to other NASA installations, other government agencies, and industry. Significant tests which were performed during calendar year 1985 in Langley test facilities, are highlighted. Both the broad range of the research and technology activities at the Langley Research Center and the contributions of this work toward maintaining United States leadership in aeronautics and space research, are illustrated. Other highlights of Langley research and technology for 1985 are described in Research and Technology-1985 Annual Report of the Langley Research Center

Managing Distributed Information: Implications for Energy Infrastructure Co-production

abstract: The Internet and climate change are two forces that are poised to both cause and enable changes in how we provide our energy infrastructure. The Internet has catalyzed enormous changes across many sectors by shifting the feedback and organizational structure of systems towards more decentralized users. Today’s energy systems require colossal shifts toward a more sustainable future. However, energy systems face enormous socio-technical lock-in and, thus far, have been largely unaffected by these destabilizing forces. More distributed information offers not only the ability to craft new markets, but to accelerate learning processes that respond to emerging user or prosumer centered design needs. This may include values and needs such as local reliability, transparency and accountability, integration into the built environment, and reduction of local pollution challenges. The same institutions (rules, norms and strategies) that dominated with the hierarchical infrastructure system of the twentieth century are unlikely to be good fit if a more distributed infrastructure increases in dominance. As information is produced at more distributed points, it is more difficult to coordinate and manage as an interconnected system. This research examines several aspects of these, historically dominant, infrastructure provisioning strategies to understand the implications of managing more distributed information. The first chapter experimentally examines information search and sharing strategies under different information protection rules. The second and third chapters focus on strategies to model and compare distributed energy production effects on shared electricity grid infrastructure. Finally, the fourth chapter dives into the literature of co-production, and explores connections between concepts in co-production and modularity (an engineering approach to information encapsulation) using the distributed energy resource regulations for San Diego, CA. Each of these sections highlights different aspects of how information rules offer a design space to enable a more adaptive, innovative and sustainable energy system that can more easily react to the shocks of the twenty-first century.Dissertation/ThesisDoctoral Dissertation Sustainability 201

An Innovative Human Machine Interface for UAS Flight Management System

The thesis is relative to the development of an innovative Human Machine Interface for UAS Flight Management System. In particular, touchscreena have been selected as data entry interface. The thesis has been done together at Alenia Aermacch

Technology transfer: Transportation

The application of NASA derived technology in solving problems related to highways, railroads, and other rapid systems is described. Additional areas/are identified where space technology may be utilized to meet requirements related to waterways, law enforcement agencies, and the trucking and recreational vehicle industries

Aeronautical Engineering: A special bibliography with indexes, supplement 67, February 1976

This bibliography lists 341 reports, articles, and other documents introduced into the NASA scientific and technical information system in January 1976

The effects of distributed solar on utilities and their customers

This dissertation evaluates the impact increasing penetrations of distributed solar will have on the electricity industry. It reconciles an analysis of the effect of increasing DPV penetration at the system scale, with an understanding of how installing DPV alters behavior at the household level. To provide such a comprehensive view on the role of DPV in the evolving utility, I construct a utility financial model and populate that with customer load and solar data. I compliment that analysis with utility billing data to gain insights on the interaction between solar installation, rate design, and electricity consumption. Results indicate that solar is likely to exacerbate existing inequities in cost allocation, the value of the solar resource is highly contextual, and installing solar is likely to change household energy consumption patterns. By incorporating insights from the macro and micro level, I demonstrate the need for markets, regulations, and rates which send appropriate signals to encourage system level efficiencies. This dissertation bridges utility modeling literature with empirical work to better understand prosumer behavior and shed light on the future of utility operations.Ph.D

Aerospace medicine and biology: A continuing bibliography with indexes (supplement 338)

This bibliography lists 139 reports, articles and other documents introduced into the NASA Scientific and Technical Information System during June 1990. Subject coverage includes: aerospace medicine and psychology, life support systems and controlled environments, safety equipment, exobiology and extraterrestrial life, and flight crew behavior and performance