Co-Authored by Topic 3 Team
Goal 3: Decrease microgrid capital costs by 15% by 2031, while reducing project development, construction, and commissioning times by 20%.
The U.S. Department of Energy commissioned the National Renewable Energy Laboratory to complete a microgrid cost study and develop a microgrid cost model. The goal is to elucidate the variables that have the highest impact on costs as well as potential areas for cost reduction. This study consists of two phases.
In commercial/industrial and utility microgrids, soft costs (43% and 24%, respectively) represent significant portion of the total costs per megawatt. Finally, energy storage contributes significantly to the total cost of commercial and community microgrids, which have percentages of 25% and 15%, respectively, of the total costs per megawatt.
The building microgrid without DG demonstrates a robust reliability, with approximately 10% more probability of surviving outages than the microgrid with DG. For outages lasting more than 4 h, the probability of surviving outages increases at additional costs.
Since microgrids are not the only way to enhance energy resilience, communities may want to consider alternate resilience investment options, including hardening existing transmission and distribution systems, weatherizing power generation sources, and building additional distribution systems to provide energy supply redundancy.
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