Since 2004, the rate at which solar cell power is installed has doubled every 22 months and is now in excess of 0.1 terawatts per year. Research driving some of this expansion began right here at Sandia more than 40 years ago.
Sandia and UK-based Structural Monitoring Systems PLC have been working together for 15 years to create transportation systems that can send a signal when they're damaged. They've outfitted a U.S. bridge with a network of sensors that will alert maintenance engineers when they detect a crack large enough to require repair.
Directly converting electrical power to heat is easy, but the opposite, converting heat into electrical power, hasn't been so easy — until now. Sandia researchers have developed a tiny silicon-based device that can harness what was previously called waste heat and turn it into DC power.
Sandia will receive $10.5 million from DOE to research and design a cheaper and more efficient solar energy system. The work focuses on refining a specific type of utility-scale solar energy technology, called concentrating solar power, which is appealing because it can supply renewable energy — even when the sun is not shining — without using batteries for storage.
In a year-long project, researchers at Sandia and Los Alamos national laboratories teamed up with the city of New Orleans to analyze ways to increase community resilience and improve the availability of critical lifeline services during and after severe weather.
The U.S. Green Building Council has awarded the Sandia/New Mexico site a LEED v.4 for Campus Certification, the first such certification at a DOE lab. It's the largest LEED Campus Certification in the history of the program, as well as the first Version 4 certification in New Mexico.
New cloud services launched at Sandia
Sandia needs ‘Zero Heroes’ to meet 2025 goal
Sandia is leading the Security and Resilience area of DOE’s Grid Modernization Laboratory Consortium and bringing its strong research capability in grid modernization to help the nation modernize its power grid.