A Decade of ESIF Innovation, the R&D 100 Awards, and the Benefits of Closed-Loop Pumped Storage Hydropower

Transforming Energy: The NREL Podcast

Hosts Kerrin Jeromin and Taylor Mankle discuss three recent stories from NREL:   

• 10 Years of Leading Energy Systems Integration: As more renewables add to our energy mix, the grid is changing—and sectors that once were siloed are now interconnecting with one another. The Energy Systems Integration Facility (ESIF) is a research facility designed to provide a space for NREL to validate these new technologies and how they are all working together. The building and its staff recently celebrated its first decade of moving clean energy innovations forward.
• R&D 100 Awards Honor NREL Innovations: Considered the Oscars of innovation, R&D World magazine presented NREL with two of its annual R&D 100 Awards for research innovations. The winning NREL technologies are the Renewable Energy Potential (reV) model and the Simulation and Emulation for Advanced Systems (SEAS) software. This year’s winners bring NREL’s total R&D 100 Award count to 74 since 1982.
• NREL Analysis Reveals Benefits of Hydropower for Grid-Scale Energy Storage: A recently published NREL study found that closed-loop pumped storage hydropower systems rank as having the lowest potential to add to the problem of global warming for energy storage when accounting for the full impacts of materials and construction.  

This episode was hosted by Kerrin Jeromin and Taylor Mankle, written and produced by Allison Montroy and Kaitlyn Stottler, and edited by James Wilcox, Joe DelNero, and Brittany Falch. Graphics are by Brittnee Gayet. Our title music is written and performed by Ted Vaca and episode music by Chuck Kurnik, Jim Riley, and Mark Sanseverino of Drift BC. Transforming Energy: The NREL Podcast is created by the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colorado. We express our gratitude and acknowledge that the land we are on is the traditional and ancestral homelands of the Arapaho, Cheyenne, and Ute peoples. Email us at [e-mail]. Follow NREL on X, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, Threads, and Facebook.