Aug. 23, 2023 | By Connor O’Neil and Moriah Petty | Contact media relations
On the day that the Energy Systems Integration Facility (ESIF) came to life in September
2013, it had already made history. An architectural marvel, the ESIF’s design matched
the science that it would feature at the facility: domain-crossing, data-infused,
radically efficient energy system science. Constructed beside 600-million-year-old
lava flows at the edge of the U.S. Department of Energy National Renewable Energy
Laboratory’s (NREL’s) South Table Mountain Campus, the ESIF became a living laboratory
where research, the building, and its equipment coevolve.
Over the past 10 years, NREL’s ESIF has incubated pivotal clean energy technologies
and has primed the world to integrate those technologies. The ESIF and its staff have
helped communities and countries to reach record amounts of renewable energy and companies
to explore the innovative edge of energy integration.
As a user facility, the ESIF has sustained a rolling flow of close collaborations.
Partners of diverse size and scope have engineered solutions in the ESIF ecosystem,
tapped ESIF’s data and computational tools to catalyze discoveries, or have literally
moved their own people and operations in among the equipment for all-access R&D. Now,
as the ESIF merges its capabilities with NREL’s Flatirons Campus to form the world-class
Advanced Research on Integrated Energy Systems (ARIES) platform, the ESIF brand of integrated research will be elevated further.
To recall and celebrate some of the ESIF’s most lasting achievements over the past
decade, the following list, in no particular order, summarizes 10 advancements that
represent its full uniqueness, foresight, and continued importance. With these achievements,
it is hard to imagine where renewable energy would be without the ESIF.
