Located on the National Renewable Energy Laboratory's campus in Golden, Colorado, the 182,500-square-foot Energy Systems Integration Facility (ESIF) is the nation's first facility to help both public and private sector researchers scale-up promising clean energy technologies -- from solar modules and wind turbines to electric vehicles and efficient, interactive home appliances -- and test how they interact with each other and the grid at utility-scale.
ESIF will house more than 15 experimental laboratories and several outdoor test beds, including an interactive hardware-in-the-loop system that lets researchers and manufacturers test their products at full power and real grid load levels. The facility will also feature a petascale supercomputer that can support large-scale modeling and simulation at one quadrillion operations per second.
The Energy Systems Integration Facility is aimed at overcoming generation, transmission, distribution and end-use challenges to support a cleaner, affordable and more secure U.S. energy mix, including research into next generation building technologies, microgrids, energy storage batteries and utility-scale renewable energy. As the cost of clean energy technologies continues to come down, seamless and efficient grid integration will help make these resources and products even more affordable, while giving Americans more control over how they use energy in their homes and businesses.
