NETL Director Brian Anderson, Ph.D., delivered a keynote address to stakeholders gathered to discuss the NETL-led Institute for the Design of Advanced Energy Systems (IDAES), emphasizing the value of the collaborative initiative for reaching the Administration’s critical decarbonization goals.

Anderson noted that the Lab is pursuing innovation at multiple scales (i.e., atomistic, device, process, grid, and market) to accelerate development and deployment of clean, advanced energy technologies. IDAES, he explained, can help bridge these scales by addressing the challenge of optimizing the design and operation of the nation’s increasingly integrated, dynamic energy systems.

“IDAES supports the de-risking and scale up of decarbonization technologies,” Anderson said. “Expanding capabilities in dynamic process modeling, techno-economic assessment and life cycle analysis are essential to meeting decarbonization goals. And simulation-based techniques will help accelerate the optimization and upscaling of facilities and help model the full supply chain to understand where the most significant challenges and opportunities lie. IDAES capabilities will help optimize supply chains and U.S. production of technologies for carbon capture and clean hydrogen.”

After Anderson’s address, David C. Miller, Ph.D., NETL senior fellow for Strategic Systems Analysis and Engineering, gave an overview of IDAES, noting more than 12 years of collaborative innovation developing advanced modeling and optimization to support the nation’s increasingly integrated energy systems.

“The workshop was our first in-person stakeholder meeting since 2019,” Miller said. “And the team was eager to share their recent advances and receive feedback from our diverse group of stakeholders. The first half of the meeting focused on advances in the IDAES computational platform, while afternoon featured applications utilizing these capabilities to support the development and deployment of technologies for decarbonization of energy and industrial systems through carbon capture, hydrogen and energy storage.”

In addition to presentations from Anderson and Miller, several NETL researchers and experts joined colleagues from other national labs, industry and academia to share their work. NETL presenters covered topics that included a broad range of research enabled by IDAES, including the award-winning PARETO, the U.S. Department of Energy’s Produced Water Optimization Initiative.

NETL is a U.S. Department of Energy national laboratory that drives innovation and delivers technological solutions for an environmentally sustainable and prosperous energy future. By leveraging its world-class talent and research facilities, NETL is ensuring affordable, abundant and reliable energy that drives a robust economy and national security, while developing technologies to manage carbon across the full life cycle, enabling environmental sustainability for all Americans.