MORGANTOWN – Energy experts from industry and academia, from across the nation and around the world gathered Thursday at the National Energy Technology Laboratory to get a glimpse at NETL’s advanced fuel research for generating power, and for a demonstration of SuperLab 2.0 – virtually linking five national labs to cooperate on a simulated power grid problem.
This was NETL’s 2024 Low Emission Advanced Power (LEAP) Workshop and the visitors started the day touring the Hybrid Performance facility.
NETL scientist Pranjali Muley explained the ReACT Facility – Reaction Analysis and Chemical Transformation.
They’re exploring new technologies for electrification, she said. For example, microwaves can be used for electromagnetic heating. With microwaves, you can heat the material you want to heat to produce the steam to turn the turbine, and not everything else in the reactor. It’s far more energy efficient.
Scientist Harry Abernathy explained NETL’s high temperature fuel cell and electrolyzer development. A solid oxide fuel cell generates electricity by oxidizing a fuel and offers the potential to produce both cheap electricity and cheap hydrogen. The fuel cells are flat, rectangular sheets coated with squares of the fuel, which are stacked inside small reactor cabinets for experimentation.
Scientist Justin Weber stood by a pair of 20-foot-tall piping arrays, linked together and surrounded by yellow catwalk. It’s a chemical looping reactor that produces steam for power generation.
They plan to rebuild it, he said, for their Advanced Scale Up Reactor Experiment – ASURE. Their plan is to explore how to produce power, hydrogen and syngas from such things as biomass and waste plastic. They’ll also look at co-gasification, where fuels are mixed to produce the gas to drive the turbine.
The looping process, he said, enables carbon capture for use elsewhere or for underground storage. It will be able to reach temperatures up to 1,000 degrees Centigrade (1,832 F).
The part of the tour wound up in a big room lined with computer screens and three scientists sitting in front of an array of computers for a demonstration of the cyber-physical reformer. From the room, they can use computer generated simulations to turn a physical gas turbine inside a huge pressure vessel. With it they can test various configurations for the best and most efficient use of fuel cells without using any actual cells.
“I’ve destroyed thousands of $8 million fuel cells,” said scientist David Tucker. “You can’t learn anything if you don’t destroy something.” They explore “how do we control it? How do we make this thing sing and dance?” Along they way, they learned, among many other things, how to extend the life of a fuel cell 10 times by changing the way they operate it.
Higher efficiency means they can reduce CO2 emissions by 90% to 95% without any carbon capture, he said. And while no fuel cells were destroyed, they did break a few turbines the size of dumbbells along the way.
SuperLab 2.0
The SuperLab 2.0 demonstration took place in the same room. All of the national labs are cyber-linked by ESNet, which enabled this demonstration.
Five labs – NETL, National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), Idaho National Laboratory (INL), Sandia National Laboratories (SNL) and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory participated.
The five labs linked 24 devices for their demonstration, among them the gas tubine at NETL, a wind turbine and a DC fast EV charger and NREL, a small modular reactor at INL, a simulated power load from customer homes at LBNL, and a simulated microgrid with a wind turbine and three diesel generators at SNL.
With NETL’s turbine whining away just outside the room, all five labs fired up their devices to simulate three scenarios and how the facilities would cooperate to respond to the sudden changes in power grid demand.
One set of monitors showed how each facility was adjusting. For instance, during a sudden load demand increase scenario, NETL could see hydrogen production from fuel cells while ramping up power production from the same fuel cells and from the gas turbine.
This was called SuperLab 2.0 because they first tried a SuperLab 1.0 back in 2017 but found communications issues that needed resolving. This version has proven more efficient.
Some SuperLab leaders attending virtually said the project goal is to promote collaboration among the labs and use their complementary strengths to tackle grid problems down the road. Future grid challenges will be too big for any one lab to handle on its own – they will require multidisciplinary, multi-institutional thinking and innovation.
One attendee, Ed Gibson, director of Emerging Technology for Pillar Innovation, with an office at Mylan Park, was impressed by the potential of all he’d seen. “We’re looking for ways to go from coal and natural gas into solar and renewables and what’s the next thing. This is exciting technology that’s happening here.”
Email: dbeard@dominionpost.com
