Problem/ Solution Statement. Problem Blending pipeline gas with hydrogen is still in the early stages of development and use. Research is required to evaluate hydrogen compatibility with pipeline materials, ensure system safety and integrity of the gas grid and hydrogen transport.
Problem/ Solution Statement. Problem Leakage of natural gas from infrastructure and appliances within residential buildings releases methane, a greenhouse gas which has a warming effect that is 25 times as potent as carbon dioxide over a 100-year time horizon. Methane leakage occurs when equipment is off (quiescent or resting conditions), when burners start and stop, and during steady burner operation. Emissions during resting conditions and during steady burner operation were measured in a pioneering study led by Xxxxxxxx Berkeley National Laboratory (Recipient) with help from Xxxxxxx Xxxxx & Associates, Inc. (RHA). In a previous study, the Recipient and RHA measured emissions from 75 houses located throughout coastal and central California and from over 100 appliances in the homes. Subsequent studies have measured emissions during start/stop events, steady burner operation, and in some cases also resting emissions for hundreds of burners on various types of natural gas appliances in California, Boston, Illinois, Indiana, and New York. These studies have consistently found that methane emission rates are highly skewed, which means that overall emissions from the population are driven by very high emissions from a small fraction of the homes and appliances. The skewed nature of the emission distribution means that an accurate estimate of the overall emission inventory requires more robust data about the frequency and magnitude of high emission equipment. Knowledge of the factors that predict or are associated with high emissions could be used to develop cost- effective programs to identify and replace high-emitting equipment. Accurate emissions data are also important for quantifying the expected benefits of policies that accelerate replacement or avoidance of natural gas infrastructure, e.g., through electrification retrofits or via restrictions on natural gas in new construction. Critical deficiencies in the data that have been collected to date limit our knowledge of overall methane emissions from the residential sector and the best approaches to reducing these emissions.
Problem/ Solution Statement. Problem The equipment that will be replaced is aging, inefficient and has been unreliable in recent years, with high maintenance costs and personnel time to troubleshoot equipment failures. Furthermore, due to the age of the equipment, it is becoming increasingly harder to find replacement parts when there is an equipment failure, as some of the parts are no longer ready-made. This is problematic when equipment issues occur during grape crush season (which has been experienced by the Recipient). Grapes must be fermented within hours of being picked; there is no ability to store grapes to process at a later time if equipment failures occur. Also critical to the fermentation process is the ability to cool the vessel the wine is being fermented in to maintain wine quality and to store the wine at consistent temperatures. If the cold temperature cannot be maintained without interruptions, the entire batch of wine is compromised, resulting in significant economic losses. Without this equipment replacement, the Recipient remains vulnerable to continued equipment failures, high maintenance costs, and potential additional losses of revenue.
Problem/ Solution Statement. Problem The decarbonization of California’s building sector has fostered the need for global collaboration on emerging technologies. While deep carbon reducing retrofits are achievable in California’s multifamily building sector, there have been a number of barriers to implementation. The majority of building retrofits excludes measures to enhance the performance of the building envelopes due to the complexity, cost, and relatively long payback of envelope improvements. There is a lack of simple, easy to install, building envelope retrofit measures. In addition, current market conditions, supply chain inefficiencies, and a lack of necessary technological solutions have made deep reducing carbon building envelope retrofits both time intensive and costly. To scale the market and drive down the cost for zero net carbon (ZNC) retrofits, significant advances in the standardization in the manufacturing of prefabricated envelope panels for the and retrofit market are needed. European retrofit markets have successfully done this by creating unitized, prefabricated, airtight and high R-value panels that are hung off of the building exterior and include high performance windows and doors. These façade and roof panels can be installed in as little as one day. These types of prefabricated retrofit panels, however, are not available in the United States (US) or designed to serve California’s building stock and climate.
Problem/ Solution Statement. Problem In operating geothermal fields, it is inherently difficult to image the movement of water and steam in a fractured geothermal reservoir in time and in three-dimensional space. Tracer tests provide ground-truth information about inter-well connectivity, but they do not directly reveal the flow paths in the regions between the xxxxx. Microseismicity mapped in three-dimensions can provide valuable information about fluid movement, but it is possible for water and steam to move through the fractured rock mass without triggering microseismicity, as well for microseismicity to be triggered without fluids.
Problem/ Solution Statement. Problem Disadvantaged communities (DACs) suffer from a combination of economic, health, and environmental burdens2 and relatively few resources are utilized on retrofits and clean energy developments, despite the fact that these communities are home to low performing buildings and little resources to complete the retrofits. Two major factors that contribute to DACs being left behind are a lack of community engagement and education and inadequate business and financial models. The wide array and disaggregated nature of financing programs, energy products, and service providers creates a confusing array of choices and potential risks. This is amplified in disadvantaged communities, where financial risks have more impact, a greater portion of residents are renters, and education and/or language barriers inhibit knowledge transfer.
Problem/ Solution Statement. Problem Large scale energy storage is a critical success factor in the widespread de-carbonization of the nation’s electric power generation and delivery capability. To date single technology solutions do not offer the required capacity, are expensive, have short duty lives, and much of their approach is harmful to the environment when decommissioning occurs.
Problem/ Solution Statement. Problem The Soboba Band of Luiseño Indians is highly impacted by planned and unplanned public safety power shut offs and grid outages. During an outage, of which there were eight in 2019 alone, the tribe’s fire station and emergency response facility is left without power, greatly limiting their ability to respond to the community and provide critical resources and potentially life-saving responses to an emergency or disaster. The Soboba community currently lacks a centralized location for the community to meet and receive services and information during an outage or emergency, leaving many residents vulnerable and isolated.
Problem/ Solution Statement. Problem By a large margin, the highest cost of next-generation, high-efficiency SiC-on-SiC power electronics is the cost of the conductive SiC material. The conductive SiC wafer, which is the base substrate that the individual power electronics are fabricated from, currently accounts for roughly 50% of the device end cost. Due to the high technical complexity associated with developing a process to replace the costly, traditional methods used in state-of-the-art wafer manufacturing, there have been no substantial, successful technological advances to reduce this wafer cost and enable large scale adoption of these next-generation power electronics. Currently, SiC power electronics cost roughly 3x traditional silicon electronics in large part due to the inefficient wire saw method for wafering SiC boules which wastes nearly half of the mass of the original workpiece as irrecoverable saw dust, damages the material as it cuts requiring substantial efforts to remove the defect-ridden SiC and furthermore takes many hours to slice while continuously using expensive consumables.
Problem/ Solution Statement. Problem Currently, PEV fast charging and discharging is only possible by using off-board direct current (DC) electric vehicle supply equipment (EVSE) that is bulky and high cost (upwards of $10,000). Because of its size, weight, and volume, DC EVSE cannot be installed onboard the PEVs. A new paradigm for the PEV fast charging and discharging approach is required to make the DC EVSE infrastructure obsolete, eliminating its complexity and cost barriers. This problem has not been addressed yet because PEV's current technology does not support fast charging and discharging directly from the grid.
