Abstract
Smart cities depend on flexible and secure energy systems to ensure resilient power for critical infrastructure; however, recent weather-related events and cyberattacks have highlighted weaknesses in our energy systems, with the potential for widespread economic and security impacts. As stated by the Executive Office of the President, “the resilience of the US electric grid is a key part of the nation’s defense against severe weather.” To address the energy delivery security challenge, microgrids are rising as a viable solution that enhances the flexibility and resilience of the distribution grid and boosts the reliability of the local supply for the end-user. Traditionally, high capital investment has been a barrier to large-scale adoption of microgrid technology. Understanding the flexibility and resilience benefits of microgrids and accounting for the associated value streams can make the microgrid’s proposition economically viable. In this chapter, microgrids’ utility and their potential to serve as a flexible and resilient resource for the utility grid by providing capabilities such as peak shaving, demand response, and frequency regulation is presented. Moreover, other value streams, such as (1) their ability to island during a disaster and sustain critical loads which makes them a robust resilience solution for end-users, in the event of the utility grid outage and (2) microgrids also provide a flexible platform for integrating distributed energy resources in conjunction with storage and conventional generation technologies, strengthen microgrid’s role in reducing the over-arching goal of emission reduction. Given the myriad of benefits associated with microgrids, we present strategies which can be employed for making microgrid itself resilient against physical and cyberthreats by employing hardware, software, and personnel training solutions to operate the microgrid before, during, and after a potential disaster. This chapter, thus, provides a holistic study of the microgrid as a resilience resource, for the utility grid, and a self-contained end-user for the end-user.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Trust boundary represents a potential attack surface that must be analyzed for vulnerabilities.
References
A. Smith, R. Katz, U.S. billion-dollar weather and climate disasters: Data sources, trends, accuracy and biases. Nat. Hazards 67, 387–410 (2013)
Executive Office of the President, Economic Benefits of Increasing Electric Grid Resilience to Weather Outages (2013)
J. Marqusee, D.J. Don II, Reliability of emergency and standby diesel generators: Impact on energy resiliency solutions. Appl. Energy 268, 114919 (2020)
S. Booth, J. Reilly, R. Butt, M. Wasco, R. Monahan, Microgrids for energy resilience: a guide to conceptual design and lessons from defense projects (National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Golden, 2020)
P. Barter, E. Borer, Case Study: Microgrid at Princeton University, Consulting- Specifying Engineer (8 June 2015)
A. Pratt, T. Bialek, Borrego Springs community Microgrid (National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Golden, 2019)
W. Mackenzie, US Microgrid Forecast: H1 2019 (2019)
B.M. Ayyub, Systems resilience for multihazard environments: Definition, metrics, and valuation for decision making. Risk Anal. 34, 340–355 (2013)
D.T. Ton, M.A. Smith, The U.S. Department of Energy's microgrid initiative. Electr. J. 25(8), 84–94 (2012)
A.L. Dimeas, N.D. Hatziargyriou, Operation of a multiagent system for microgrid control. IEEE Trans. Power Syst. 20(3), 1447–1455 (2005)
F. Martin-Martinez, A. Sanchez-Miralles, M. Rivier, A literature review of Microgrids: a functional layer based classification. Renew. Sustain. Energy Rev. 62, 1133–1153 (2016)
J. Spector, Microgrid on the march: utilities are building out new business models to make islanding work, Green Tech Media, 07 Feb 2017. [Online]. Available: https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/distributech-roundup-microgrids-on-the-march. Accessed 19 Mar 2020
H. Dunham, D. Cutler, S. Mishra, X. Li, Evaluation of centralized and distributed Microgrid topologies considering voltage constraints, arXiv.org (2019)
B. Hannegan, The role of Microgrids in a clean energy future
I. S. Association, 1547–2018 – IEEE standard for interconnection and interoperability of distributed energy resources with associated electric power systems interfaces (2018)
M. Allen, Redundancy: N+1, N+2 vs. 2N vs. 2N+1 (Part II), Datacenters.com, 16 Nov 2016. [Online]. Available: https://www.datacenters.com/news/redundancy-n-1-n-2-vs-2n-vs-2n-1-part-ii. Accessed 08 May 2020
M. Khatibi, S. Ahmed, Impact of distributed energy resources on frequency regulation of the bulk power system, in 2019 IEEE Conference on Power Electronics and Renewable Energy (CPERE), Aswan City, Egypt (2020)
K. Mahmoud, M. Abdel-Akher, A.-F. A. Ahmed, Sizing and locating distributed generations for losses minimization and voltage stability improvement, in 2010 IEEE International Conference on Power and Energy, Kuala Lumpus, Malaysia (2010)
A. Parizad, A. Khazali, M. Kalantar, Optimal placement of distributed generation with sensitivity factors considering voltage stability and losses indices, in 2010 18th Iranian Conference on Electrical Engineering, in 2010 18th Iranian Conference on Electrical Engineering, Isfahan, Iran, 2010
Z. Wang, J. Wang, Self-healing resilient distribution systems based on Sectionalization into microgrids. IEEE Trans. Power Syst. 30(6), 3139–3149 (2015)
C.L. Moreira, F.O. Resende, J.P. Lopes, Using low voltage MicroGrids for service restoration. IEEE Trans. Power Syst. 22(1), 395–403 (2007)
Y. Xu, C.-C. Liu, Z. Wang, K. Mo, K.P. Schneider, F.K. Tuffner, DGs for service restoration to critical loads in a secondary network. IEEE Transactions on Smart Grid 10(1), 435–447 (2019)
Z. Bie, Y. Lin, G. Li, F. Li, Battling the extreme: a study on the power system resilience. Proceedings of the IEEE 105(7), 1253–1266 (2017)
S. Mishra, K. Anderson, B. Miller, K. Boyer, A. Warren, Microgrid Resilience: A holistic approach for assessing threats, identifying vulnerabilities, and designing corresponding mitigation strategies. Appl. Energy 264, 114726 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apenergy.2020.114726
S. E. International, Canada launches first utility-scale Microgrid system, Power Engineering, 11 July 2019. [Online]. Available: https://www.power-eng.com/2019/07/11/canada-launches-first-utility-scale-microgrid-system/#gref. Accessed 15 Apr 2020
DER, Canada’s first utility-scale Microgrid Completed, T&D World, 11 July 2019. [Online]. Available: https://www.tdworld.com/distributed-energy-resources/article/20972846/canadas-first-utilityscale-microgrid-completed. Accessed 15 Apr 2020
P. McMullen, Power Play, Canadian Consulting Engineer, 29 Aug 2019. [Online]. Available: https://www.canadianconsultingengineer.com/features/power-play/. Accessed 08 May 2020
M. Witynski, North Bay completes Canada’s first utility-scale microgrid, Utility Dive, 17 July 2019. [Online]. Available: https://www.utilitydive.com/news/north-bay-completes-canadas-first-utility-scale-microgrid/558799/. Accessed 15 Apr 2020
D.C. Kwasnik, S.P. Balamurugan, S.S. Booth, B.F. Sparn, K. Hsu, A Demonstration of Blockchain-based energy transactions between laboratory test homes, in ACEEE summer study on energy efficiency in buildings, (Pacific Grove, California, 2018)
E. Wood, How two Arizona Microgrids Helped the Macro Grid: a year in review, microgridknowledge.com, 02 Apr 2018. [Online]. Available: https://microgridknowledge.com/microgrids-arizona-frequency/. Accessed 15 Apr 2020
Microgrid Provides Resiliency Hub with Sustainable Power to Community, S&C Electric Company, North Bay, Ontario, Canada (2019)
How it works, Community Energy Park – Why a microgrid? [Online]. Available: http://www.communityenergypark.ca/how-it-works/. Accessed 15 Apr 2020
Acknowledgments
This work was authored by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), operated by Alliance for Sustainable Energy, LLC, for the US Department of Energy (DOE) under Contract No. DE-AC36-08GO28308. The views expressed in the article do not necessarily represent the views of the DOE or the US Government. The US Government retains and the publisher, by accepting the article for publication, acknowledges that the US Government retains a nonexclusive, paid-up, irrevocable, worldwide license to publish or reproduce the published form of this work, or allow others to do so, for US Government purposes.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2021 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Mishra, S., Kwasnik, T., Anderson, K., Wood, R. (2021). Microgrid’s Role in Enhancing the Security and Flexibility of City Energy Systems. In: Shafie-khah, M., Amini, M.H. (eds) Flexible Resources for Smart Cities. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82796-0_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82796-0_4
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-82795-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-82796-0
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)