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Field trips

National Renewable Energy Laboratory

A Report from Energy Ant — My Trip to the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colorado

Energy Ant and friends with hybrid vehicle
image Energy Ant with model wind turbine
image of Energy Ant with display of energy efficient construction ideas
image of solar panel testing site
image of Solar Energy Resource Facility at NREL

Whew! The EIA really has me traveling. In beautiful Golden, Colorado, the U.S. Department of Energy has a cool place —the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. Boy, there’s sure a lot going on here. The laboratory works hard to study technology for energy that is renewable and efficient. Let's go look around and see the different things the lab does.

The first stop on the tour was the hybrid car. Let me guess, this car looks just like the one your older brother drives, so how could it be new technology? The difference between this car and your brother’s is the technology that powers the car.

Most hybrid cars that are on the road today use an internal combustion engine to power a battery. These batteries actually run the car. The engine comes on when you need to start the car and when you need more power, like when you drive up a big hill. Many hybrid cars also have a technology called regenerative breaking. When you step on the breaks, this process generates energy that is stored in the battery too!

The second stop on our tour was a look at a model of an advanced wind turbine. Most turbines are huge—like this one! The blades are usually 32 to 66 feet (10 to 20 meters) long, and one blade can weigh more than 900 pounds. That’s more than this ant could carry! Wind turbines are used to produce electricity. A wind farm is a bunch of wind turbines clumped together and hooked up to the electricity grid. You may get some of your electricity from wind energy and not even know it. We can’t use wind energy everywhere though. For the turbine to turn, the wind has to blow at least 9 miles per hour. Wind is one of the most economical renewable energy sources right now, along with hydropower, and the use of wind power is growing about 25% each year.

The Laboratory also provides information on constructing new, energy efficient homes—for example, using compact florescent bulbs. These bulbs fit into a normal light socket but use one-quarter of the energy used by regular light bulbs. They also put out a lot less heat; so in the summer, you don’t have to cool your house as much. And for other examples, having your house built in a way that the walls would store heat in their mass during the day—so that you can keep your house warm at night; landscaping with deciduous trees (trees that loose their leaves during the fall and winter); and using special window glass called low-e glass. Not as much heat escapes through low-e glass as through a normal piece of glass.

Outside, we took a look at a huge solar conductor on the mesa. The scientists here take data from it and even put the information up online. We also looked at other solar technology being developed here—for example, a solar panel testing site (pictured below).

Solar panels can be made in many different ways. You can use different gases inside the panel, different materials for the panels, different electrical wiring for the panels, just to name a few of the design differences. The Laboratory creates and tests all kinds of solar panels, hoping to make them more efficient, durable, and cost-effective all the time. The solar panels that you can buy today are made of silicon and glass, so they are kind of fragile. They are also only about 10 to 14 percent efficient.

In the Laboratory's Solar Energy Research Facility (pictured left), scientists conduct research on photovoltaics(PVs, or solar cells) and on basic energy sciences, thus developing the science of renewable energy technologies.