About the 2023 Electricity ATB

Purpose

With the increasing reliance of energy analysis on data and modeling tools, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) developed the Annual Technology Baseline (ATB) products to:

Document transparent, normalized technology cost and performance assumptions using published sources
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 of 5- to 30-year futures.

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 analysts use in NREL's long-term capacity expansion model (the Regional Energy Deployment System, or ReEDS) and its market deployment 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 and geospatial data tools such as RE Atlas can be used to identify resource data of interest.

ATB Team

Each year, the ATB is led by 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 2023 ATB national laboratory team members include:

Land-based wind: Tyler Stehly, Annika Eberle, Owen Roberts, and Daniel Mulas Hernando, NREL
Offshore wind: Patrick Duffy, Daniel Mulas Hernando, and Philipp Beiter, NREL
Distributed wind: Tyler Stehly and Owen Roberts, NREL
Solar: Photovoltaics (PV): David Feldman and Jarett Zuboy, NREL
Solar: Concentrating solar power: Chad Augustine and Parthiv Kurup, NREL
Hydropower: Gbadebo Oladosu, Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Geothermal: Dayo Akindipe and Erik Witter, NREL
Battery storage: Vignesh Ramasamy and Wesley Cole, NREL
Utility-scale PV-plus-battery: Vignesh Ramasamy and Anna Schleifer, NREL
Pumped storage hydropower: Stuart Cohen and Evan Rosenlieb, NREL
Nuclear and biopower (Data from U.S. Energy Information Administration): Wesley Cole, NREL
Fossil technologies (Data from DOE Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management source): Jeffrey Hoffmann, DOE Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management
Finance: David Feldman and Brian Mirletz, NREL
Project coordination: Laura Vimmerstedt and Brian Mirletz, NREL
Data and documentation development: Sertac Akar, Greg Avery, and Dana Stright, NREL
Website production: Mike Bannister and Jeremy Jenkins, NREL
Editing: Mike Meshek, Ashish Sedai, Sophie-Min Thomson, NREL.

The DOE manager of the ATB is Paul Spitsen.

ATB Technical Review Committee

A technical review committee reviews the ATB each year. The committee:

Reviews objectives and approach, and offers suggestions where appropriate to strengthen the annual process and resolve technical issues that arise
Provides suggestions to improve the accuracy, clarity, and understanding of the work
Helps ensure the study:
- Builds on prior peer-reviewed, related technical work
- Is informed by data sources and findings from recent and current related research
- Reviews and comments on draft results to ensure findings are based on facts and accurate engineering and science.

The ATB Technical Review Committee is composed of leading experts from industry, consulting, government, and academia with specialties in energy analysis, renewable electricity generation technology research, development, and deployment; electric grid operation and technology integration; and project finance.

ATB Sponsor

The ATB, which is supported by the DOE Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE) Strategic Analysis team, leverages and continues significant activity funded by DOE, including individual technologies and market segments within EERE, as well as the Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management.

Recommended Citation

We recommend you cite the 2023 ATB as NREL (2023) and reference it as:

NREL (National Renewable Energy Laboratory). 2023. "2023 Annual Technology Baseline." Golden, CO: National Renewable Energy Laboratory. https://atb.nrel.gov/.