Oak Ridge National Laboratory is leading many projects that could change how we use and save energy nationwide.
U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm will visit East Tennessee next week to check in on the region’s energy innovations.
The visit is part of the Biden administration’s plan to fund projects around and emphasize goals of decarbonization, clean energy, climate change and environmental justice.
“Solutions that are being worked on here at the lab are the solutions that we need to deploy,” Granholm said during her visit last fall to ORNL.
Granholm will speak with community leaders in Knoxville’s Western Heights. The neighborhood is part of a project led by ORNL to retrofit about a dozen single-family houses and one commercial building with panels that improve energy efficiency, energy cost and overall quality of life.
If projects like this multi-year installation succeed, the technology could be deployed widely to help reduce strain on the nation’s electric grid and lower energy costs.
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These panels are designed to insulate the structures and decrease energy bills for residents.
The technology is intended to also help with comfort, moisture durability and aesthetics of the exterior, according to a Department of Energy spokesperson.
“ORNL will monitor energy use and indoor air quality for about a year after the retrofit to validate performance,” the DOE spokesperson said in an email to Knox News. “Our goals include reducing thermal loads by 75%, improving comfort, and enhancing aesthetics.”
Secretary Granholm also will attend a ceremony for a new facility at ORNL that will house the United States Stable Isotope Production and Research Center. The center will focus on enriching stable isotopes for a variety of uses: medical, industrial and national security, according to a DOE spokesperson.
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“The demand for these isotopes has increased significantly over the past decade, and SIPRC will reduce our nation’s dependency on foreign suppliers for critical isotopes,” the DOE spokesperson said in an email to Knox News.
The Secretary will meet Tuesday with the Secretary of Energy Advisory Board to discuss how to modernize our electric grid and make it more resilient against heat waves and other weather patterns. They’ll also discuss how to deploy grid-scale battery storage that would allow electric grids across the country to store and deploy energy produced from sources such as solar and wind, reducing the nation’s dependency on fossil fuels.
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