Scientists at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory are joining university partners in Tennessee and Georgia for three new projects addressing real-world needs to help improve energy and environmental resilience in the U.S. Southeast. The projects span from development of combined heat and power technology for remote areas, to a consolidated information portal for local decision-makers, to estimates of the carbon storage potential of regional forests.
The projects are part of the Science and Technology for Applied Regional Solutions, or STARS program, sponsored by the Climate Change Science Institute, or CCSI, at ORNL.
CCSI STARS brings together ORNL and two of the lab’s core university partners, the Georgia Institute of Technology and Vanderbilt University, on projects that connect combined science and technology strengths with community stakeholders and other collaborators to serve real-world needs in the Southeast and nationally.
“We’re looking forward to fine-tuning our research to be as useful as possible in collaboration with these key partners,” said Peter Thornton, CCSI director and lead for the ORNL Earth Systems Science Section. “It's exciting to turn our attention to the greater stakeholder community and bring our science forward from the fundamental side for direct impact.”
The projects follow a Southeast Decarbonization Workshop sponsored last year by CCSI and Georgia Tech that drew scientists and representatives from industry, government, academia, nonprofits and other organizations to strategize about clean energy in the Southeast. A report from the workshop emphasized opportunities for collaboration.
The STARS projects include:
Micro-Combined Heat & Power for remote communities
In partnership with Georgia Tech, this project will further develop and demonstrate ORNL’s high-efficiency micro-combined heat and power, or micro-CHP, system to create a building application ideal for remote communities in the Southeast. The micro-CHP system was recognized with an R&D 100 Award this year.
The project’s goal is to refine the micro-CHP system to generate electricity using hydrogen and efficiently capture heat that would otherwise be wasted, providing thermal energy such as steam or hot water for space heating and hot water supply, along with power output.
The system designed for a single home can play a critical role in enabling more efficient energy usage than that achieved when heat and electricity are produced in separate processes. The technology is ideal for remote and underserved communities in the Southeast and can serve as the backbone for resilient microgrids for buildings by providing a reliable baseload source of electricity and thermal energy.
Researchers plan to collaborate with industrial partner Enginuity Power Systems and with the Socially Equal Energy Efficient Development community organization in Knoxville, Tennessee, to develop and demonstrate use of the technology at a remote location.
An atlas focusing on storm impacts for real-world applications
In partnership with Georgia Tech, researchers are developing an interactive, digital platform to deliver relevant, state-of-the-art information on long-term weather patterns and resulting impacts to key decision-makers in easy-to-comprehend formats from local to regional scales in the Southeast.
A portal to be developed as part of the project will initially focus on information related to transportation, providing data on meteorological conditions and patterns that can affect traffic safety. The portal would serve as an early warning system of potential or expected traffic impacts as storms move in, for instance.
The portal will have three key elements: 1) An online portal providing straightforward graphical illustrations and textual interpretations of data ranging from local to state levels and watershed to basin scales; 2) integration of all major global and locally refined bias-adjusted historical and future Earth system simulations, providing flexibility in investigating future scenarios; and 3) data transformed into relevant metrics that stakeholders need for decision-making at the local level. The work synthesizes historical and current data with estimates of what future impacts might look like in different areas of the Southeast.
Quantifying carbon offset potential in southeastern forests
In partnership with Vanderbilt University, this project will quantify present and future carbon storage and offset potential in Southeast forests under varying environmental and land-use scenarios. The project leverages the integration of model intercomparison, data synthesis and high-resolution simulations using the DOE Energy Exascale Earth System Model land model, which models, simulates and predicts future scenarios.
Researchers are developing an interactive website on Southeast forest carbon storage and offset potential that can be used for decision-making and educational purposes, including identification of offset areas with lower vulnerabilities. The work comes as voluntary global carbon credit markets are getting started, and participants are eager for standards for different carbon mitigation efforts. The project intends to provide estimates of the amount of carbon that can be sequestered in the Southeast under varying vegetation and soil conditions.
“Georgia Tech is thrilled to be collaborating on these ORNL STARS initiatives,” said Marilyn Brown, Regents’ and Brook Byers Professor of Sustainable Systems in the Georgia Tech School of Public Policy. They focus on key priorities for the Southeast: Making rural communities less vulnerable to power outages; helping citizens and businesses prepare for weather extremes; and protecting the region’s vast forest resources by strengthening markets for the carbon they sequester.
“Altogether these projects could be transformational,” Brown added.
“This has been an amazing opportunity for our students to contribute to cutting-edge scientific research that will inform solutions on critical societal problems of the day,” said Leah Dundon, director of the Vanderbilt Climate Change Initiative and research assistant professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering. “The potential for growth in forest carbon markets — and how American forest owners may participate in and benefit from those markets — is a major national and international issue right now. And the work my students are doing with ORNL on this topic is already garnering interest from stakeholders in the Southeast United States and beyond.”
UT-Battelle manages ORNL for the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States. The Office of Science is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit energy.gov/science.
