Optimal sizing of microgrid DERs for specialized critical load resilience

Abstract

Distributed energy resources (DER) microgrids, especially photovoltaic (PV) and battery energy storage systems (BESS) are being more widely deployed behind the meter for decarbonizing the grid. This paper studies their impact on providing resilience to critical infrastructure, particularly which have a flat daily load profile such as hospitals and data centers. The study models load data from Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (LBNL) which has a flat critical load profile. The authors model a single and multi-day outage using the Distributed Energy Resources Customer Adoption Model (DERCAM) to optimize the configuration of DER based microgrids to support these outages. The authors expand these microgrid configurations to determine the microgrid DER sizes for other critical load levels which have a similar flat profile. The economic analysis presented here includes savings from cost of lost load due to outages, utility bill savings and carbon emission savings to compute a more complete accounting of costs and benefits. These results are then compared to the cost of resilience support traditionally provided by diesel generators. Finally, the net economic benefits are summarized suggesting that including resilience costs from lost load and other economic factors supports investments in DER microgrids for resilience support.