Rolls-Royce will hold a 73.1 percent stake in Berlin-based electricity storage specialist Qinous GmbH later this month.

The company is acquiring the shareholdings of all other current financial investors, including that of investment holdings company IBB Beteiligungsgesellschaft mbH.

Qinous GmbH is involved in battery storage systems and associated control systems and has already implemented storage solutions around the world.

“Our new subsidiary is to play a pivotal role going forward,” said Andreas Schell, CEO of Rolls-Royce Power Systems Division. “This is where we are going to pool all the division’s microgrid activities – from simple storage solutions to complete, complex microgrid solutions of various sizes and configurations. As a young, start-up-style company, Qinous brings expertise that is an ideal complement to Rolls-Royce’s industrial credentials.”

The joint development work on a range of storage solutions in recent months has shown that the two companies are an excellent fit and, as Schell explained, “that we can achieve new market potential by integrating more closely. We see great market potential for sustainable power supplies, especially for distributed, environmentally-friendly MTU microgrid solutions.”

“Taking a majority holding in Qinous is a major step forward as we transform into a provider of integrated solutions for our customers. Qinous has made a name for itself with modular, scalable, prefabricated plug-and-play battery products that combine renewable energy sources, power generators and battery storage technology. Rolls-Royce is a specialist in customized energy solutions with the worldwide sales and service network of its product and solution brand MTU.

“This even closer partnership between Rolls-Royce and Qinous is a logical and consistent step towards opening up the rapidly growing microgrid market,” said Steffen Heinrich, co-founder and co-managing director of Qinous. “The functionality and reliability of the solutions have been proven in a large number of projects. Now, with MTU’s experience and global presence, we can meet demand more quickly and more comprehensively.”

The modular component system of the coordinated Qinous/MTU product range will in future allow the configuration of solutions from 30 kW/30 kWh to several megawatts.

California’s largest electric utility took the unprecedented step of shutting off power to millions of customers beginning last October. The decision was meant to prevent power equipment from sparking catastrophic wildfires.

Now a renewable energy microgrid on a tiny California Native American reservation is proving to be one solution to this ongoing problem.

The Blue Lake Rancheria is located just north of Eureka, Calif. On the 100-acre campus, just behind the casino and hotel, Jana Ganion opens a chain-link fence.

“We’re up on a little platform that can oversee most of the array,” she says. “This is the view I like the best.”

Inside, in an area half the size of a football field, are more than 1,500 solar panels, slanted toward the noonday sun.

Ganion is the sustainability director with the Blue Lake Rancheria, which includes about 50 members. She helped build this solar microgrid as part of the tribe’s goal to develop climate-resilient infrastructure and to be ready for earthquakes and tsunamis.

But then beginning in October, it became useful in a whole new way.

The utility, Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E), shut off power to more than 30 counties in Central and Northern California on Oct. 9.

“We had probably 30- to 45-minute gas lines,” Ganion says. “People were fueling up vehicles, but also their home generators. That continued, basically, for the duration of the 28-hour outage.”

As one of the only gas stations in the county with power, the reservation provided diesel to United Indian Health Services to refrigerate their medications and to the Mad River Fish Hatchery to keep their fish alive. The local newspaper used a hotel conference room to put out the next day’s paper. Area residents stopped by to charge their cell phones.

Ganion estimates that on that day more than 10,000 nearby residents came to the reservation for gas and supplies.

A Maine-based non-profit group is hoping to build on ENMAX’s pending purchase of Emera Maine to create a microgrid on Mount Desert Island (MDI).

The group — A Climate to Thrive (ACTT) — intervened late in the Maine Public Utilities Commission’s review of the proposed deal.

The grassroots organization hoped that ENMAX would agree to support a microgrid project on Mount Desert island, which is connected to the mainland by a bridge.

“ACTT seeks to develop a ‘Freedom Lab’ to implement cutting-edge technology, modulate demand through storage and flexible loads, encourage beneficial electrification, explore transactive energy, and manage rapidly increasing distributed energy resources as MDI’s local generation achieves a greater and greater share of its electricity needs,” the group said in comments filed with the PUC.

The group recommended that Emera Maine’s sale be conditioned on ENMAX agreeing to put in place a “significantly-sized” microgrid as a demonstration project and financial and technical support for low-income households for energy efficiency retrofits and solar and renewable energy installations.

Island bracing for climate change
A microgrid could help address power outages that are becoming more common because of climate change, according to ACTT.

“Pro-active experimentation with microgrids that can ‘island’ under outage conditions and improve grid management at all times is now warranted,” the group told the PUC.

Because of its late intervention into the case, a settlement agreement was reached among key stakeholders that didn’t include ACTT’s requests, according to Ken Colburn, a board member of the group and a principal with the Regulatory Assistance Project.

Even so, the group has had discussions with ENMAX and the intervention in the case served as a “relationship building step,” Colburn said.

The beauty of the microgrid is it can be customized to meet the precise resiliency, economic, and environmental goals of any customer. This is possible because every microgrid is a personalized energy system made of available distributed energy resources (DER). Although its ability to customize is one of the microgrid platform’s strongest selling points, the downsides from the customer perspective can include time and money.

In response to time and money costs, there is a growing movement within microgrid ranks — modular microgrids. The alternative approach is to commoditize standard microgrid offerings that can be pieced together like Lego blocks, thereby shrinking design and deployment costs. Plug-and-play microgrids are attractive to financiers because they create a portfolio of similar assets, which transforms microgrids into a modular product. Although they are a minority portion of the market if measured by peak capacity, modular microgrids have the potential to make up the majority of systems deployed by 2029.

What exactly is a modular microgrid? Navigant Research, a Guidehouse company, defines modular microgrids in a new Modular Microgrids report as:

Meeting the basic definitions of a microgrid, with the distinguishing feature being the ability to island and operate autonomously but include the following attributes:

• Pre-configured key hardware components
• Ability to customize operations through software (often in the cloud)
• Streamlined deployment procedures that reduce the need for onsite engineering during installation
• The list of vendors moving in this modular direction is growing. Among them are Enchanted Rock, Scale Microgrid Solutions, Tecogen, and Bloom Energy in the US and each has focused on grid-connected systems. Globally, there are hundreds of companies offering containerized, modular microgrids for off-grid energy access or remote mining operations. The firms range from startups to industry veterans. ABB and Schneider Electric are key international players.

Duke Energy’s Jessica Wells explores how one lineman’s idea lead to development of a Great Smoky Mountains National Park microgrid. Learn how using solar power and batteries, Duke Energy was able to remove power lines atop Mt. Sterling.

Jeff Fisher has spent more time than most in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Not as a tourist, but as a lifelong resident of North Carolina’s Haywood County and a lineworker. The park is home to some of the tallest mountains on the east coast, and Fisher has spent his 34-year career at Duke Energy hiking the challenging terrain to fix broken power poles, wires and equipment to get the lights back on as quickly and safely as possible.

With as much time as he spends walking in the woods, he has had plenty of opportunity to think about better ways to provide power. One of his ideas removed 3.5 miles of power lines and helped provide reliable power for park rangers to communicate in emergencies. Duke Energy installed a microgrid consisting of solar panels and batteries at the top of Mt. Sterling, one of the highest peaks in the park.

Fisher estimates he climbed Mt. Sterling seven times a year to make repairs to the line before the microgrid, but now he doesn’t have to repair the system at all. He visits every six months for routine maintenance with a representative from NantEnergy (formerly Fluidic Energy), a vendor that provided the microgrid system.

He sounded like a tour guide driving his white pickup truck around winding roads in the Cataloochee valley on a recent visit to the trail, pointing out places of interest like the general store where he buys local honey, an old church that’s mostly used for decoration, and, on the left, a turn in the road where you’re likely to spot elk roaming the protected lands.

At the top of the mountain, there’s a tower containing communication equipment for rangers in remote areas of the park. The radio system was powered by a 3.5-mile line, which was sufficient since it was installed in the 1960s, but, it had limitations. During high winds and heavy snow, trees fell on the line and knocked out power, which left the park without a way to communicate between ranger stations. If a hiker were to be injured during an outage, it would be impossible to dispatch emergency services.

Microgrid Knowledge’s 10 most popular microgrid white papers of 2019 explore key questions surrounding microgrid development, finance, design, construction and operation. Top papers also focus on microgrid affordability and the evolution of distributed energy resources.

These paper — and energy headlines in 2019 — make clear that energy customers are looking for resiliency and reliability that often only a microgrid can provide. They show that different and fresh financing models, like energy-as-a-service, are making microgrids affordable to businesses and communities.

As a result, interest in microgrid research is high. Microgrid Knowledge members have free access to a full library of microgrid white papers , covering a range of clean energy topics, from emerging technology and trends to non-wires alternatives, financing and ownership models.

New white papers are regularly added by a range of microgrid and clean energy leaders, among them S&C Electric, Siemens, Ameresco, Schneider Electric.

Below you will find the top 10 most downloaded white papers on Microgrid Knowledge in 2019, covering everything from microgrid affordability to the evolution of distributed energy resources:

1. The Evolution of Distributed Energy Resources

This report makes plain the complexities involved in capturing DER benefits. Some of the most significant advantages occur within wholesale energy market transactions, a complex arena best pursued with guidance from experts in the space.

1. The Financial Decision-Makers Guide to Energy-as-a-Service Microgrids

A new energy-as-a-service (EaaS) model has emerged that simplifies microgrid development and ownership for organizations. EaaS relieves the microgrid host from operational and financial risk—but guarantees them the benefits. This special report highlights in detail the new model for energy-as-a-service microgrids.

Hospitals are among the most critical facilities for ongoing public health and emergency response. As recent events have shown, power outages don’t discriminate, which puts hospitals and their patients at grave risk. At the same time, hospitals are energy intensive, using 2.5 times more energy than similar size buildings, adding significant expense to a model that is under constant pressure to reduce costs. To meet these needs, hospitals are exploring new energy models and advanced technologies, including microgrids. And there’s never been a better time to do so.

The evolving healthcare infrastructure

Over the last decade, there has been a trend in the healthcare industry to become more effective in delivering its services in order to reduce the cost of care. This effort often focuses on reducing inefficiencies in workflow processes, building systems and infrastructure. Chief among these initiatives is improving energy efficiency.

Hospitals must care for patients 24/7, which creates greater demand for lighting, heat and cooling, hot water and steam for equipment sterilization, and refrigeration for temperature sensitive or perishable medications. This demand means hospitals use more than double the energy compared to commercial buildings of the same size.

Aside from the obvious need for reduced energy consumption, there are several other challenges driving the need for energy transformation in healthcare.

1. Budgetary pressures. There is growing demand for healthcare organizations to expand their ambulatory care facilities and add more advanced, energy-intensive diagnostic equipment, which makes the cost of energy a big priority for administrators already tasked with cost management.
2. Meeting sustainability goals. In the U.S., healthcare emissions represent 10% of national emissions, with hospitals representing 39% of that total. Reducing their carbon footprint is a growing objective for healthcare facilities. In addition to meeting regulatory requirements, minimizing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions can also help achieve green building certification and create a “greener” image in the community.
3. Ensuring patient safety and services. Continuous, reliable and available power is vital to ensure life-sustaining equipment is operational. Extreme weather and aging infrastructure mean grid stability issues are becoming increasingly common in many regions. Such issues can impact power supply and distribution, leading to poor power quality and reliability, damage to costly power-sensitive equipment and increased patient risk. While most hospitals have emergency backup generation in place, often as diesel-powered generation, this form of generation is under attack for its sustainable, long-term viability.

As these challenges become more prominent, healthcare facilities are tackling the energy problem at the source, embracing distributed energy resources (DERs), renewable generation and microgrids to transform their energy infrastructure.

From rags to riches, the Philadelphia Navy Yard offers one of the more remarkable tales of the emergence of a microgrid.

Located at the confluence of the Schuylkill and Delaware Rivers, the site was an abandoned shipyard 20 years ago with most of its electric service turned off. Today, it’s a thriving commercial center, powered by one of the nation’s most sophisticated — and evolving — microgrids.

Credit for its success goes to an unusual coming together of the military, the city of Philadelphia, the local electric utility, a development authority and some energy visionaries. Oh, and dog lovers.

The story begins in the late 1990s when the federal government decided to shutdown the Naval shipyard, one of 97 major installations closed as part of the United States post Cold War military cutback. The decision left city officials trying to figure out how to blunt the economic loss. The shipyard, once one of the world’s largest, employed 47,000 people at its height during World War II. By the time it announced plans to close, it had 7,400 employees.

The city turned the project over to the Philadelphia Economic Development Corporation (PIDC), a public/private entity charged with redeveloping the 1,200 acres into a commercial center.

No one to run the power system
At one time the shipyard had what a RAND report called one of the “largest, most complex” utility systems in the region. But before the base closed, most of it was no longer working. The Army had decommissioned all but a portion it would use for a scaled-down operation.

“We were about to take over a thousand acres of property, most of which was not going to have electric service,” said John Grady, president and CEO in an interview at the PIDC’s office in Philadelphia. “So our vision for energy and sustainability started with a very practical problem.”

Horizon Power’s poster child for the shift to a distributed renewable grid, the Western Australia (WA) Pilbara town of Onslow, says its solar and battery microgrid is already helping to deliver more reliable and cleaner power — at levels of up to 90% renewables.

The WA regional utility said on Tuesday that the newly commissioned 1 MW solar and battery microgrid had notched up some new milestones, including reliability testing, and the first stage of an intelligent control system.

The latter was being tested to ensure that the microgrid integrated effectively with the broader power system, once fully operational.

“We are achieving up to 90% of the power being delivered in Onslow coming from renewable sources with the commissioning of the solar and battery,” a company spokesperson said. “However, this is not constant and depends on how much demand, time of the day, cloud cover, etc. The expected reduction in CO2 emissions is 820 tonnes a year.”

Seeking 100% renewables at certain times
“Before the commissioning of the solar and battery, we had 100% fossil fuel generation in the town and we are aiming to reach 100% of generation from renewable sources in the town, at certain times of the day and year, as an outcome of this pilot,” the spokesperson said. “We expect to achieve the highest levels of renewable energy penetration during the middle of the day in the cooler months.”

As we have reported on One Step, Horizon Power’s Renewable Energy Pilot in Onslow — the launching base for the massive Wheatstone LNG project owned by Chevron — combines a new 8 MW gas-fired power plant with distributed and utility-scale solar and battery storage.

Horizon Power built the gas plant in Onslow which was commissioned last year, and this year has delivered the solar farm and battery.

When we think of a microgrid, we typically think of an installation which relies on a few sources of energy and supplies relatively few consumers with electricity. We automatically think of isolated regions – in fact, microgrids are typically equated with fully grid-independent standalone systems.

By contrast, hybrid microgrids can be connected to small public, regional or even national power grids. At the same time, they do need to be able to operate in complete self-sufficiency in order to supply consumers with electricity as needed. The power output of such hybrid microgrids ranges from a few kilowatts to several megawatts.

The customary purpose of conventional microgrids is to supply power to offgrid regions and facilities. However, the main goal of hybrid microgrids is to reduce the costs of energy provision and move more in the direction of complete independence from fossil fuels by raising the proportion of renewable energy in the energy mix. In some particular applications, there is a grid connection, but the grid is not sufficiently stable. Then the hybrid microgrid is intended to secure the supply of energy, even in the event of a blackout.

Complex requirements
Their various functions and modes of operation mean that hybrid power plants – and in particular, their energy management systems – face complex requirements. They must be able to incorporate local energy sources such as solar energy or small hydrostations, ensuring that the proportion of renewables is as great as possible, particularly with regard to the reduction of carbon emissions. The different energy generators must also be monitored and controlled accordingly in real time. This is the job of the energy management system (EMS). Acting in a manner similar to that of an orchestral conductor, the EMS monitors and optimizes all the important parameters, such as frequency and voltage, as well as active, reactive and apparent power.

As proven by the approximate 70 projects brought to fruition worldwide, electricity consumption rises as soon as a stable power supply becomes available, and this increase in consumption can range anywhere from 7 to 24%. A hybrid microgrid must also be able to keep up with and adjust to rising demand for energy.

Since power plants are designed to operate for at least 20 years, advancements in technology and components must be taken into account. Hybrid microgrids should be made ready to incorporate new developments and amended technologies – ideally regardless of the manufacturer, since market change is a given. Existing companies could disappear from the market or new suppliers could enter it and introduce innovative new technologies. Therefore, the EMS should be able to monitor and control technology of any origin.