Microgrids for Fun and Profit: The Economics of Installation Investments and Operations

A vision shared by many experts is that future communities (residential and commercial developments, university and industrial campuses, military installations, and so on) will be self-sufficient with respect to energy production and will adopt microgrids. With power generation capacities of 10-50 MW, microgrids are usually intended for the local production of power with islanding capabilities and have capacity available for sale back to macrogrids. A typical microgrid portfolio includes photovoltaic (PV) and wind resources, gas-fired generation, demand-response capabilities, electrical and thermal storage, combined heat and power (CHP), and connectivity to the grid. Advanced technologies such as fuel cells may also be included. This article describes the problems encountered in analyzing prospective microgrid economics and environmental and reliability performance and presents some results from the software tools developed for these tasks.