The terminology might seem diminutive, but there is no doubt that the future for microgrids is anything but small.
In fact, in future, microgrids themselves won’t necessarily be that small physically in their own right either. Misconceptions about the isolation of microgrids also abound.
They don’t have to work in full isolation, they may in fact be made up of several small grids and via the legacy grid, they may well be connected in the future to series of similar microgrids. It’s not easy to find a catch-all term that encompasses all of these characteristics. So with the objective of scaling up the benefits of microgrids to larger and larger systems, is the name misleading?
“Possibly, yes,” says Troy Miller, director of grid solutions at S&C Electric. “We’ve got some exciting projects in the pipeline that are much larger. People have used the term microgrid generically to mean a system, whatever the size, that can be separated from, islanded from. The overall larger grid is measured in GWs and TWs, microgrids can be tens or hundreds of MW. I haven’t heard a name for them as they get bigger but people have coined new terms for them as they got smaller, nano- grids and pico-grids.”
S&C played a key role in the development of an ambitious micro-grid project completed in 2015 for the Texas utility firm Oncor. The site is part of a large Oncor testing facility that had been operating with diesel back-up. The motivation for the project was two-fold, one financial and one strategic.
“They originally wanted to build a microgrid from the ground up, greenfield, with all new sources of generation. To save on some of the capex they decided to integrate the existing generation assets. So they hired S&C to create a dynamic microgrid to combine the sources they had on-site with some newer assets, a microturbine, some battery storage as well as PV,” explains Miller. “It was a fairly complex problem. They were looking to reduce the amount of energy they used and use the most energy efficient sources first, the PV, followed by the energy storage, followed by the microturbine and lastly the diesel, to reduce their need for additional generation. Then they were trying to match the critical loads with the available and existing generation.”
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