State Energy Office Direct Technical Assistance

Wastewater infrastructure is vital for maintaining public health, environmental safety, economic stability, and overall community functionality. To secure those outcomes and manage existing and future risk, the Illinois Office of Energy aims to improve wastewater treatment plants through energy system upgrades. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory supported Illinois by evaluating technologies suited to support wastewater treatment plants, documenting costs and benefits of various approaches, and characterizing realistic bounds on system planning. As a result, the Resilient Energy for Wastewater Infrastructure Grant Program will support Illinois facilities in achieving state energy goals.

This Kentucky projections presentation sets long-term electricity sector projections for the state using the Regional Energy Deployment System model.

An additional economic development impact analysis quantified the potential impact of developing designated sites on Kentucky's electricity load growth, providing insights at both the state and county level considering the next 10 years. This analysis explicitly incorporates and addresses key project uncertainties by developing various load growth scenarios that account for development scale, site specificity, and sector variability.

The Maine Department of Energy Resources was interested in a small-scale pilot utilizing REopt, NLR’s techno-economic decision support tool, to expand on previous efforts to address reliability challenges and the length of outages experienced across the state. This project also helped the department better understand what information should be gathered to maximize the efficacy of the REopt analysis. The pilot identified and collaborated with three community facilities across the state to help identify their goals and provide technical specifications on optimal energy generation and storage strategies. At the conclusion of the project, a REopt analysis was conducted for each identified facility according to their goals. Each community was then given the opportunity to discuss the results of the analysis with NLR and identify priorities and next steps to achieve their goals.

This Mid-Atlantic Cohort planning presentation summarizes key topics from Federal Energy Regulatory Commission Order 1920, Building for the Future Through Electric Regional Transmission Planning and Cost Allocation.

It highlights the main reforms from the regulation, including perspectives on how the new rules may be implemented. The presentation serves as a resource for policymakers, utilities, industry, and researchers seeking to understand how the new ruling may impact regional transmission planning.

To map and prioritize critical infrastructure, energy cost, and reliability, Minnesota developed an interactive Carto map of the pilot community as a method to support prioritization and a strategy for identifying high-priority communities for future engagement. St. Cloud was selected as a pilot community to create and update a prioritization map and adjust the analysis for future statewide scaling.

The New Mexico Energy and Conservation Management Division sought technical assistance to enhance its ability to evaluate program impacts using the Low-Income Energy Affordability Data tool. NLR assisted the Energy and Conservation Management Division in leveraging the tool to calculate and analyze costs across electric utility service areas, enabling them to assess program outcomes more effectively. NLR developed a customized methodology to calculate utility-specific metrics using census tract data and available utility service area information from the Energy Information Administration. The analysis, described in this report, provided the Energy and Conservation Management Division with a new capability to evaluate program success.

Subject matter experts developed a building code overview in response to a request from the North Dakota state energy office. This effort was part of a larger report delivered to the state, and was intended to provide access to resources from the U.S. Department of Energy that provide general information and frequently asked questions about building and energy codes:

Energy Codes 101: What Are They?

Building Energy Codes—Development, Adoption, Implementation, and Compliance.

Utah aims to meet its growing energy needs with a focus on doubling energy generation. One of the greatest challenges to meeting this goal will be the transmission and distribution system. Utah needed analysis to inform discussions on new generation, the likely network congestion based on new power flows, and modeling of the state's energy infrastructure. To support this need, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory developed a baseline understanding of recent historical congestion in the existing transmission system based on electricity market prices. The results shared in this analysis of electricity price differentials presentation visualize and provide metrics on congestion within Utah and between Utah and its neighbors from 2015 to 2023.

Meeting data center demand growth in Virginia may require several options. The Virginia options presentation outlines how grid-enhancing technologies and upgrades to existing power line infrastructure could help meet demand in the short and medium term.

In addition, NLR reported on potential solutions to demand growth in Virginia to summarize project load growth in Virginia and use cases of virtual power plants. The technical analysis estimates demand flexibility technical potential across common sectors and end uses, demonstrating substantial demand flexibility potential in Virginia well above Virginia’s currently assessed demand response capacity.