The Energy Systems Integration Facility (ESIF) is a new renewable energy testing facility in Colorado, run by the Department of Energy (DOE) and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL).
The $135 million dollar testing and research center is located in the city of Golden, and specializes in developing technology to integrate renewable energy production with the current electrical grid on an industrial scale. The facility is available to both private and public organizations looking to test new technology to bring renewable energy onto the nation's electrical grid.
The new facility on the campus of the NREL is home to 15 separate laboratories for researchers, including facilities for testing energy storage, thermal storage materials, and manufacturing processes.
In addition to the laboratories, there are several outdoor test beds and a rooftop test area. One of these beds allows engineers a chance to test their development at realistic megawatt-scale power loads and load levels. This is known as a hardware-in-the-loop system. A supercomputer is also available at the center for researchers to use while modeling their experiments. This computer is a petascale design, allowing the calculation of a million billion operations a second.
"This new facility will allow for an even stronger partnership with manufacturers, utilities and researchers to help integrate more clean, renewable energy into a smarter, more reliable and more resilient power grid," Ernest Moniz, Secretary of Energy, said.
With 182,500 square feet of room, the center houses testing facilities for a wide variety of technologies, including wind and solar, along with grounds used to test experimental vehicles. Home appliances can also be tested at the center. The new facility can hold around 200 scientists at a time.
Other testing facilities around the country run by the DOE are home to 30,000 researchers a year. The network is designed to give scientists and engineers access to equipment they may not be able to use otherwise, including supercomputers and high-powered X-ray sources.
Advanced Energy Industries, a developer of renewable energy technologies, is one of the first companies that will be testing equipment, a new generation of solar power inverters, at the new facility.
Corporations who use the facility pay the full cost of any experiments they perform, unless they agree to publish their results, which earns the organization a discount. Facility users retain all intellectual and data rights from research conducted at the facility.
