That experience and expertise lays the groundwork for strategies to incorporate large penetrations of renewable energy within microgrids that are now being built in developed countries for entirely new reasons. We’ve learned a lot from working with people to design distributed power systems in these remote locations. The high cost of diesel fuel and new efforts to “green” the energy supply have spurred HOMER Energy customers to model the addition of renewable energy to these remote, diesel grids. Most of these locations were in developing countries and depended solely on diesel engines, which often ran for only a few hours per day. This includes villages, islands, mines, telecom sites and the military’s forward operating bases. Up until very recently, the most obvious use for microgrids was to provide energy access in off-grid settings, remote areas that were not near a reliable grid power or any grid at all. Remote, Off-grid Microgrids: The Original Imperative This becomes increasingly important with increasing concerns about terrorism, cyber attacks, and extreme weather events made more likely by climate change. Since the vast majority of grid outages are the result of disturbances in the distribution system, the only way to protect against those outages is to have the energy resources on the customer’s side of the distribution system. They offer important benefits in terms of energy resiliency because of their ability to operate either connected or independently from the main electric grid. They are also able to buffer the impact of variable renewable energy generation on larger power systems to which they might be attached. Together, all of these trends are increasing the demand for distributed energy projects and creating an upsurge of interest in microgrids, which are a subset of the distributed energy marketplace.īecause of their ability to manage a variety of energy resources as a single system, microgrids have proven they are able to accommodate large penetrations of renewable energy. Another factor is the evolution of information and communication technologies that allows more sophisticated and affordable controls. This is primarily driven by the plummeting cost of solar, and now storage is following the same trajectory. As the distributed energy marketplace grows by leaps and bounds, it’s also changing rapidly. According to Greentech Media Research, distributed resources are now poised to double in the U.S.
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Distributed Energy is Poised for “Explosive Growth”Īlthough the HOMER software was originally developed as a research tool at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, I always believed that there was a huge potential for clean distributed power.
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The history of microgrids can help us understand how to approach developing new distributed energy projects. This enables a streamlined design process that cuts the costs of distributed energy development. What energy resources make the most sense for a given geography and use case? How should generation assets be sized? And, how will the environmental impacts and economic outcomes of various configurations compare? Ultimately our software modeling reveals what kinds of distributed energy project designs result in the best investments, and what the return on that investment will be. We try to simplify the complexity by providing a strong decision support framework. One of the things we strive to do with each release of our HOMER software products is to help our users make better decisions about how to design and develop distributed energy projects.
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