Say you want to study something big—like a community power grid, a massive pipe system, or roadways crisscrossing the entire United States—but none of it exists, at least not yet. How do you study these invisible labyrinths to make sure they will be safe and efficient?

Good question, and here is the answer: You do that at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) on a platform called the Advanced Research on Integrated Energy Systems (or ARIES, for short).

NREL’s experts have built a research platform that can create 3D simulations of entire power grids—either existing or theoretical—that contain thousands or even millions of different energy technologies. For example, researchers can populate an existing grid with wind turbines, solar panels, batteries, nuclear facilities, electric vehicles, or even smart devices, like our cell phones, to see how they could impact our future grid.

But until recently, one grid puzzle piece has not been well represented.

“The part that has been missing is: How can we simulate or represent water power devices?” said Rob Hovsapian, a mechanical engineer at NREL and an ARIES research advisor who helped introduce hydropower into the platform.

With ARIES, researchers can play out and plan for almost any future grid scenario. For example: How could huge amounts of renewable energy impact different community grids? And how could hydropower help our power system weather hurricanes, cold snaps, cyberattacks, and other disruptions?

“It allows us to do those ‘what if’ scenarios,” Hovsapian said. “In the real world, you’re limited to what's there.”

Now, we can ask “what ifs” about water power technologies, like hydropower and the more nascent marine energy (sometimes called ocean energy because it often comes from powerful ocean waves, currents, and tides, but it can refer to energy from river currents as well). Though very different, both water power technologies generate predictable energy, making them a dependable partner for more variable energy sources, like wind energy and solar power. Those renewables, along with energy storage (like batteries), have been part of ARIES for a good while now. It was time to sprinkle a little water into the mix.

“Now that we can use ARIES to simulate hydropower, we can study more scenarios in more locations and even potential future energy systems,” said Jerry Davis, the laboratory program manager for ARIES. “We want to represent as many renewable generation sources as we can.”

But that is harder than it might sound.

A Hydropower Simulator Helps a Remote Alaskan Village

When fishers return to the harbor in the remote village of Cordova, Alaska, they enter a cove full of mast spikes resembling hundreds of mini-church spires. Those fishers—and there are a lot in Cordova—bring in salmon, halibut, rockfish, and trout but also something less desirable: a 400% increase in energy demand, which can strain the small village’s microgrid, a standalone power system that depends on just two hydropower plants and diesel generators (and diesel must be flown or boated in, often at great expense).

And that is a problem.

Cordova’s microgrid—and everything it powers, including hospitals and homes—is vulnerable to spikes in energy demand from the summer fish bonanza and Alaska’s dangerously cold winters as well as extreme weather events, like avalanches and droughts. The village needed solutions—novel ways for their microgrid to bob and weave with all these changes, so they can match energy supply to demand, especially when their economy or lives depend on it.

But you cannot simply tinker with such a critical system, hoping your manipulations do not cause a blackout or irreparable damage. Nor can you study something that does not exist, like batteries or solar panels that have yet to be installed.

That is where NREL and ARIES come in.

The village was one of the first communities to directly benefit from ARIES’ hydropower emulation platform, which, like the rest of ARIES, relies on hardware and software to accurately simulate the town’s spiderweb of energy devices. ARIES’ software programs, which are built on real-world data, can mimic actual grids (like Cordova’s microgrid), so researchers can manipulate the Cordova system in the safety of a computer simulation. Soon, ARIES will also be able to connect actual hardware, like a hydropower generator, to these virtual simulations so the system can receive live feedback from real tech and learn from it.

For hydropower, ARIES’ simulation capability is especially valuable. Although researchers can install experimental solar panels and wind turbines at a laboratory field site, they cannot replicate hydropower plants—they are simply too big and too specific to certain river sites or geography.

Instead, Mayank Panwar, a senior research engineer at NREL, and Hovsapian built what they call a Real-Time Hydropower Emulation Platform, which can mimic real-world hydropower facilities in real time—one second in the hydropower simulator equates to one second in the real world. As of today, their 2.5-megawatt emulator uses data from actual hydropower plants (including those in Cordova) to inform its simulations.

“As we add more and more technologies to ARIES and there’s more and more variability and uncertainty with the grid, such as wind and solar, hydro will play a key role in providing stability to the grid,” Hovsapian said. “But how would we quantify that? ARIES will be an ideal environment for us to do that.”

With ARIES, Hovsapian can ask more “what if” questions, like what if this hydropower plant in Cordova is paired with a 10-megawatt battery or 3 megawatts of solar panels instead of 1? And how do these changes impact the grid’s reliability? Thanks to ARIES, Cordova has their answers—and a more resilient grid, too.

No other system in the world can accomplish this kind of plug-and-play simulation, Hovsapian said.

And it is not just hydropower that benefits.

Getting Marine Energy to Communities Quickly

Marine energy is still in the early stages of development, but these technologies can be valuable sources of clean energy for communities that have ample flowing water and little else. Like Cordova, the Alaskan village of Igiugig also relies on expensive shipments of diesel fuel. Many island communities off the coast of Maine struggle to maintain stable power when weather whips through. Communities in Hawaii, where energy costs are typically higher than in the rest of the country, also often depend on costly imported fuels.

And yet, all three of these areas have one powerful thing in common: hefty amounts of water. With energy from river currents, waves, and tides, each community could improve its energy resilience and potentially achieve its clean energy goals, too.

There is just one problem: Before communities opt to install one of these nascent devices, they need greater confidence that the technologies can deliver on their promise—and that is exactly what ARIES can provide.

At NREL, researchers are studying marine energy technologies “to make sure that things don't fail in the field,” said Kumaraguru Prabakar, a research engineer at the laboratory. “Even if a small river generator is powering a small house, it is powering the grid, so you have to make sure it’s safe.”

And for that—and more complicated analyses—he needs ARIES.

Right now, Prabakar is examining how marine energy technologies slot into preexisting grids. Currents tend to be consistent, but rivers are still subject to freezes and droughts. Waves and tides are predictable but do not always churn out the same amount of power throughout the day or year. With ARIES, Prabakar can assess how these variations might impact different power systems and whether other solutions, like energy stored as green hydrogen, could balance out these fluctuations.

ARIES’ biggest gift might be time. In the last decade, researchers used to take years to validate new energy technologies, Prabakar said. But now, with ARIES, experts can significantly speed up that process (ARIES can even pair up with similar simulators at other national laboratories to pull in even more data, capabilities, and answers). Speed is especially critical to accelerate the development of marine energy technologies so they can help fight climate change sooner rather than later.

“If somebody comes up with an idea to add water power, they should be able to deploy it in less than 12 months,” Prabakar said.

“It’s exciting,” Hovsapian added. “There are a lot of changes coming, and ARIES can help us prepare.”

Learn more about the Advanced Research on Integrated Energy Systems (ARIES), the nation’s most advanced platform for energy system integration research and validation at scale. And subscribe to the NREL water power newsletter, The Current, to make sure you do not miss a water power update.