About the 2021 Electricity ATB

Purpose

With the increasing reliance of energy analysis on its data and modeling tools, NREL developed the ATB products to:

Develop and document transparent, normalized technology cost and performance assumptions
Document potential pathways for impacts of R&D on renewable energy technologies
Enable consistency in technology assumptions across analysis projects
Facilitate the tracking and sourcing of input assumptions
Reduce the lead time required when conducting scenario analysis.

Related Work

The ATB is one of many data products and tools that the NREL energy analysis staff provides.

The NREL Standard Scenarios product is a suite of forward-looking power sector scenarios that NREL projects use in its long-term capacity expansion model (the Regional Energy Deployment System, or ReEDS) and its market penetration model (the Distributed Generation Market Demand Model, or dGen). The scenarios are updated each year, and they use technology cost and performance assumptions documented in the Electricity ATB.

For analysis of specific renewable energy systems at the project level, NREL offers the System Advisor Model (SAM) techno-economic modeling software.

NREL's resource assessment interactive maps can be used to identify resource data of interest.

ATB Team

Each year, the ATB is led by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), assembled by a team of analysts from the U.S. Department of Energy's national laboratories, and sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE).

The 2021 ATB national laboratory team members include:

Land-based wind: Tyler Stehly, NREL
Offshore wind: Philipp Beiter and Patrick Duffy, NREL
Solar: Photovoltaics (PV): David Feldman, NREL
Solar: Concentrating solar power (CSP): Parthiv Kurup and Craig Turchi, NREL
Hydropower: Gbadebo Oladosu, Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL)
Geothermal: Greg Rhodes, NREL
Battery storage: Chad Augustine, NREL
Utility-scale PV-plus-battery: Caitlin Murphy and Anna Schleifer, NREL
Pumped-storage hydropower: Stuart Cohen, NREL
Nuclear, biopower, and battery technologies (U.S. Energy Information Administration source): Wesley Cole, NREL
Fossil technologies (DOE Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management [FE] source): Jeffrey Hoffmann, DOE-FE
Finance: David Feldman and Paul Schwabe, NREL; Mark Bolinger, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL)
Project coordination: Laura Vimmerstedt; Data and documentation development: Sertac Akar, Brian Mirletz, and Dana Stright; Website production: Mike Bannister and Jeremy Jenkins; Editing: Cheryl D'Alessandro, Mike Meshek, Ashreeta Prasanna, Vignesh Ramasamy, and Ashok Sekar, NREL.

The DOE managers of the ATB are Paul Donohoo-Vallett and Seungwook Ma.

ATB Sponsor

The ATB, which is supported by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE), Office of Strategic Programs, leverages and continues significant activity funded by DOE and the EERE for individual technologies and market segments.

Recommended Citation

We recommend you cite the 2021 ATB as NREL (2021) and reference it as:

NREL (National Renewable Energy Laboratory). 2021. "2021 Annual Technology Baseline." Golden, CO: National Renewable Energy Laboratory. https://atb.nrel.gov/.