About the 2020 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 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 (dGen). The scenarios are updated each year, and they use technology cost and performance assumptions documented in the ATB.

For analysis of specific renewable energy systems at the project level, NREL offers the System Advisor Model 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 2020 ATB national laboratory team members include:

• Land-based wind: Tyler Stehly and Eric Lantz, NREL
• Offshore wind: Philipp Beiter, NREL
• Solar PV: David Feldman, NREL
• Solar CSP: Parthiv Kurup and Craig Turchi, NREL
• Hydropower: Gbadebo Oladosu, Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL)
• Geothermal: Greg Rhodes, NREL
• Fossil, nuclear, biopower, and battery technologies: Wesley Cole, NREL
• Finance: David Feldman and Paul Schwabe, NREL; Mark Bolinger, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL)
• Project coordination: Laura Vimmerstedt; Data development: SertacAkar, Ashwin Ramdas, and Dana Stright; Website production: Mike Bannister, Jeremy Jenkins, and Jim Vezina; Editing: Cheryl D'Alessandro, Darice Guittet, Mike Meshek, and Brian Mirletz, NREL.

The DOE manager of the ATB is Paul Donohoo-Vallett.

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 2020 ATB as NREL (2020) and reference it as:

NREL (National Renewable Energy Laboratory). 2020. "2020 Annual Technology Baseline." Golden, CO: National Renewable Energy Laboratory. https://atb.nrel.gov/.