By Rod Walton, EnergyTech Senior Editor
LONG BEACH, California--Decarbonization is only one beneficial and desired goal of the microgrid movement.
The damage wrought from climate disasters has pinpointed the need for power resiliency and sustainability for customers both residential and industrial. The costs of building island-able, standalone or connected microgrids is proving competitive or maybe even preferable to traditional methods of system hardening, experts said during a session at the InterSolar North American-Energy Storage North America Convention in Long Beach.
Those options are especially clear when you’re between a rock and a hard place, both geographically and financially, the microgrid panelists noted. But even as the focus was on remote and low-income customers for these projects, these microgrid solutions make fiscal sense and could fit C&I customers and mission critical energy users such as universities, military and health care campuses.
Leaders from utility Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) and partner BoxPower detailed the key motivations and methods behind installation of the Briceburg Microgrid (pictured) in a remote part of California near Yosemite National Park. Wildfires have ravaged the state for years, destroying millions of acres and downing miles upon miles of power lines.
PG&E settled on an idea to build a solar, storage and gen-set hybrid remote grid to serve a small number of customers instead of undergrounding distribution lines and repair the macrogrid connection. The utility worked with Box Power which delivered the modular system, which fits into a space the size of a backyard and was commissioned in June 2021.
“There was a need for drastically different architecture” to achieve system hardening,” Bennett Chabott, manager of PG&E’s grid innovation team and a leader on the Briceburg Microgrid project. “A remote grid can be more cost-effective… We think there are hundreds of these that we need to build as soon as possible.”
BoxPower supplied a microgrid combining 36.5-kW solar capacity, 70-kWh battery storage and two propane gen-sets. The Briceburg project development and construction was funded by the utility as a rate-based model.
The challenges were many, from terrain to remote locations. Nonetheless. BoxPower founder and CEO Angelo Campus pointed out, it had to meet utility-grade substation standards.
“It has to be rugged as they come,” he said. “Since then (commissioning) there hasn’t been a single outage.”
The Briceburg microgrid resiliency is monitored and controlled remotely, with no sacrifice to energy delivery, he added.
The panel also discussed similar solar-storage and gen-set microgrids for public transportation stations and low-income housing.
Intersolar-Energy Storage North American continues through Saturday. It is the event’s first live convention in two years.
