At Microgrid 2018, Edward Yim, associate director at the DC Department of Energy and Environment, shared how scalable resilience and a focus on climate strategies can pave the way for a more reliable energy future.
While towns and cities show increasing interest in community microgrids little easily accessible guidance exists for municipal leaders who are exploring the concept. To help these communities get started, Microgrid Knowledge has produced this special report.
Looking forward, this group plans to advance several initiatives focused on accelerating smart microgrid systems in Canada and globally – focused on sharing best practices and enhancing collaboration between industry, communities, academia, and utilities.
Community microgrids empower local leaders to serve community energy needs in a more economical, reliable, and environmentally friendly manner than the existing centralized electricity grid. A microgrid can bring together a whole community by establishing clean distributed generation, renewable energy, and smart energy management. Community microgrids are the future to more efficient energy systems.
Energy policies are motivating a nationwide desire to increase the application of renewable energy resources, distributed generation and energy storage devices. Successful application of distributed generation requires an enterprise-level system perspective which views generation and associated loads as an integrated and autonomous subsystem or a “Microgrid”.
Despite the best efforts of electricity grid planners and operators, the number of major electrical blackouts around the world is growing year on year, whether caused by natural disaster or human triggered events. These blackouts often come at incredible cost to businesses and society at large – the recent Great East Japan Earthquake left up to 8 million people without power for over 10 days, and a cascading failure in 2012 in India left more than 9 % of the world’s population without electricity.
Economic, technology and environmental incentives are
changing the face of electricity generation and transmission. Centralized generating facilities are giving way to smaller, more distributed generation partially due to the loss of traditional economies of scale.
Microgrids can be engineered to connect to utility systems with switchgear and protection systems that are meant to ensure safe and smooth operation through all modes – i.e., fully grid-connected, islanded, and during transition, while an islanded system is preparing to re-connect to the grid. Some – but not all – microgrids are fully synchronized to the alternating current (AC) on the utility feeder line, matching the microgrid’s power to the voltage, frequency, and phase angle of the utility’s po wer
The dominant paradigm for the generation and sale of electricity over the last 130 plus years has been the construction of large central power stations (generation) connected to transmission lines that move power from the power station to lower voltage distribution systems and eventually to the consumer. The current power grid was designed for the one-way flow of electricity. This paper will use the term macrogrid to describe the electricity delivery system from the point of generation to the point of use by consumers.
The report from Black and Veatch describes microgrids as a key element of power grid modernization. Their complexity allows them to fulfill three goals increasingly pursued by communities: low-carbon energy, resiliency and electric reliability. Microgrids do so by managing multiple forms of generation with advanced controllers. This sets microgrids apart from simpler distributed generation projects.
Copyright © 2022