Publications

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Because of the inevitable depletion of fossil fuels and the corresponding release of carbon to the environment, the global energy future is complex. Some of the consequences may be politically and economically disruptive, and expensive to remedy. For the next several centuries, fuel requirements will increase with population, land use, and ecosystem degradation. Current or projected levels of aggregated energy resource use will not sustain civilization as we know it beyond a few more generations. At the same time, issues of energy security, reliability, sustainability, recoverability, and safety need attention. We supply a top-down, qualitative model--the surety model--to balance expenditures of limited resources to assure success while at the same time avoiding catastrophic failure. Looking at U.S. energy challenges from a surety perspective offers new insights on possible strategies for developing solutions to challenges. The energy surety model with its focus on the attributes of security and sustainability could be extrapolated into a global energy system using a more comprehensive energy surety model than that used here. In fact, the success of the energy surety strategy ultimately requires a more global perspective. We use a 200 year time frame for sustainability because extending farther into the future would almost certainly miss the advent and perfection of new technologies or changing needs of society.

This report began with a Laboratory-Directed Research and Development (LDRD) project to improve Sandia National Laboratories multidisciplinary capabilities in energy systems analysis. The aim is to understand how various electricity generating options can best serve needs in the United States. The initial product is documented in a series of white papers that span a broad range of topics, including the successes and failures of past modeling studies, sustainability, oil dependence, energy security, and nuclear power. Summaries of these projects are included here. These projects have provided a background and discussion framework for the Energy Systems Analysis LDRD team to carry out an inter-comparison of many of the commonly available electric power sources in present use, comparisons of those options, and efforts needed to realize progress towards those options. A computer aid has been developed to compare various options based on cost and other attributes such as technological, social, and policy constraints. The Energy Systems Analysis team has developed a multi-criteria framework that will allow comparison of energy options with a set of metrics that can be used across all technologies. This report discusses several evaluation techniques and introduces the set of criteria developed for this LDRD.

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The development and application of energy technologies for all aspects from generation to storage have improved dramatically with the advent of advanced computational tools, particularly modeling and simulation. Modeling and simulation are not new to energy technology development, and have been used extensively ever since the first commercial computers were available. However, recent advances in computing power and access have broadened the extent and use, and, through increased fidelity (i.e., accuracy) of the models due to greatly enhanced computing power, the increased reliance on modeling and simulation has shifted the balance point between modeling and experimentation. The complex nature of energy technologies has motivated researchers to use these tools to understand better performance, reliability and cost issues related to energy. The tools originated in sciences such as the strength of materials (nuclear reactor containment vessels); physics, heat transfer and fluid flow (oil production); chemistry, physics, and electronics (photovoltaics); and geosciences and fluid flow (oil exploration and reservoir storage). Other tools include mathematics, such as statistics, for assessing project risks. This paper describes a few advancements made possible by these tools and explores the benefits and costs of their use, particularly as they relate to the acceleration of energy technology development. The computational complexity ranges from basic spreadsheets to complex numerical simulations using hardware ranging from personal computers (PCs) to Cray computers. In all cases, the benefits of using modeling and simulation relate to lower risks, accelerated technology development, or lower cost projects.