Providing Microgrid Resilience during Emergencies Using Distributed Energy Resources

Several incidents reported in the past have shown the inability of the existing power grid to provide reliable services during system failures. Moreover, the communication and control network in the smart grid inherently creates opportunities for the adversaries to launch cyber attacks to the system. Natural disasters may further exacerbate the challenge. Designing resilient (if not robust) solutions for the smart grid therefore, was, and remains a high priority. To this end, we present three solutions towards resilience of a microgrid during emergencies. First, we propose the use of electric vehicles (EVs) as temporary power supplies to support critical infrastructure during emergencies. Second, we recommend to use a combination of distributed renewable energy sources, EVs and a community-level storage unit to further enhance the resilience of the microgrid, by utilizing the locally available renewable energy options, exploiting the electric vehicles moderately, and by investing reasonably on the storage unit. Third, we introduce the software defined networking paradigm as a highly relevant platform for both power virtualization and network function virtualization, to support, coordinate and control the dynamic operation of the virtual power plants for reliable power supply and resilient operations of the microgrid in the disaster mode. Finally, we discuss the feasibility of each of these solutions for implementing them in practice.