ECIS Strategic Plan
(pdf 5.2 MB)

Energy, Climate, & Infrastructure Security

The Energy Security program works to reduce the risks of transformative energy solutions that will enhance the nation’s security and economic prosperity. The Climate Security program works to understand and prepare the nation for the national security implications of climate change. The Infrastructure Security program develops and applies technologies/analytical approaches to secure the nation’s critical infrastructure against natural or malicious disruption. The Enabling Capabilities program is the capability base that supports ECIS and champions science at Sandia.

Energy Security

The Energy Security program area works to reduce the risks of transformative energy solutions that will enhance the nation’s security and economic prosperity. Energy security research at Sandia seeks to address key challenges facing our nation and the world. We work with the energy industry to improve current hardware and develop the next generation of technologies to extract or produce energy.

The Energy, Climate, and Infrastructure Security (ECIS) Strategic Management Unit (SMU) spearheads research into energy alternatives that will help the nation reduce its dependence on oil and coal and to combat the effects of climate change. Sandia’s long history with geothermal, solar, and wind energy research has seen a vast increase in effort and intensity over the past 15 years and has also been supplemented in recent years with efforts in biologically based fuels: biomass from nonfood plant sources and algae—both of which can be grown on land unsuitable for farming.

Climate Security

The Climate Security program works to understand and prepare the nation for the national security implications of climate change.National security is Sandia National Laboratories’ foundational mission. Our nation’s security can only be achieved in a stable international environment. Sandia maintains close working relationships within the many agencies of the intelligence community and the DoD. There is a growing recognition of the importance of the impact of climate change on emergent security dynamics and intervention capabilities as documented in a series of reports. The UK Ministry of Defense previously devoted more than one-third of its analysis on threats due to climate change. The climate instability we now anticipate will produce conditions that increase border tensions, reduce the abilities of allies to respond, and provide an environment ripe for breeding terrorism and extremism. Most importantly, the DoD report, “Impacts of Climate Change,” notes the critical need to substantiate climate concerns by developing analytical tools to ensure self consistency, realism, validation, and a concrete foundation for strategic/tactical and operational execution.

Infrastructure Security

The Infrastructure Security program develops and applies technologies and analytical approaches to secure the nation’s critical infrastructure against natural or malicious disruption.Our nation’s energy infrastructure faces two foundational challenges as we seek our vision towards an energy independent and secure future. First, elements of the infrastructure, such as the electricity transmission and distribution network, have not significantly changed since their initial creation over a century ago. It is clear that new approaches are required for the grid to accommodate the integration of intermittent renewable energy sources such as solar and wind. Second, the reliability and resilience of our grid is central to our national security. For example, robust and secure power is essential to key infrastructure such as military installations. Economically, electricity outages presently cost our economy $150 billion annually.

Enabling Capabilities

The DOE Office of Science (SC) is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the U.S., providing more than 40 percent of total funding in this area. Sandia has active research programs funded by the SC Offices of Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR), Basic Energy Sciences (BES), Biological & Environmental Research (BER), and Fusion Energy Sciences (FES). This work is foundational to many mission areas at Sandia, from energy, to nuclear weapons, to national security generally. The Office of Science is renowned for its ability to build and operate user facilities to enable fundamental research that are open to researchers from around the world on the basis of peer reviewed proposals.

The Rush to Exploit an Increasingly Ice-Free ArcticIt’s that time of year again, when we check in to see where the annual Arctic sea ice minimum will end up. We haven’t quite bottomed out at the end of the melt season, yet, but already 2012 has set new records for smallest Arctic sea ice extent and volume, smashing through the numbers from 2007. Records are often [...]

Sandia Labs Helping Industry Tackle Wind Turbine ReliabilityA new measurement developed by Sandia National Laboratories should help the wind energy industry benchmark its performance, understand vulnerabilities, and enhance productivity. Until now, wind farm owners and operators had no way to compare their output with the output of similar operations. To benchmark the reliability of the U.S. wind turbine fleet and identify major causes of [...]

Sandia’s Ron Lipinski Wins DOE Award for Mars Rover WorkRon Lipinski has to imagine everything that can go wrong in a system. When he’s examining the Mars Curiosity Rover’s plutonium power generator, or a safety analysis for the Kennedy Space Center, a lot can be at stake. Lipinski is the team leader for the Mars Science Laboratory Multi-Mission Radioisotope Thermal Generator team. For his work at Sandia National Laboratories, [...]

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• Solar Power International (SPI) Workshop: Achieving High Penetrations of PV: Streamlining Interconnection and Managing Variability in a Utility Distribution System
  September 14, 2012 to September 14, 2012, Orange County Convention Center, West Concourse - Room 306A
  

  Next week at the Solar Power International Conference, the Department of Energy (DOE), the Electric Power Research Instisute (EPRI), Sandia National Laboratories, and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) have joined forces in a workshop that will focus on PV systems operating in the utility system, and it will review operational issues, update interconnection rules and regulatory actions, address PV lessons learned from high penetration scenarios, identify best practices for distributed generation problem mitigation, discuss technology advancements including advanced inverters, consider forecasting tools for grid operators, and review case studies of industry experience. The workshop will address areas of common interest and is designed for PV developers, system integrators, utility distribution and interconnection engineers, inverter manufacturers, forecast providers, and those who work in codes, standards and regulation.

  Map to Orange County Convention Center, West Concourse - Room 306A
• Control System Design using Energy Storage to Improve Dynamic Performance in Large-Scale Electric Power Grids
  September 25, 2012 to September 25, 2012, Dreese Laboratories
  

  David A. Schoenwald
  Energy Storage & Transmission Analysis Department
  Sandia National Laboratories
  
  Abstract: This talk will present results on two applications of energy storage for the improvement of power system dynamic performance that will become necessary as more intermittent renewable energy sources are incorporated into the electric power grid. The first application is the design and implementation of a battery-based control system to reduce the variability of photovoltaic (PV) power output at the generation site. The control system is challenged with the task of reducing short-term PV output variability while avoiding the overworking of the battery, both in terms of capacity and amp capability. A full-scale implementation was deployed in a demonstration project, in partnership with an electric utility and a battery manufacturer. Both simulation and experimental results will be presented. The second application is the analysis and design of a decentralized control system to increase the damping associated with inter-area oscillation modes. These modes arise from the swinging of many generators in one part of the power grid against generators in another part of the grid. Analysis and simulation results for the control system design will be presented for both a reduced-order model of the WECC (Western Electricity Coordinating Council) and a full-scale PSLF (Positive Sequence Load Flow) model of the WECC.

  Map to Dreese Laboratories

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