Both companies already have considerable skin in the microgrid game, including together, on the community-level battery storage pilot kicked off last year in the northern suburbs of Perth – a sustainable community development at Alkimos Beach that combines 1.1MWh of lithium-ion battery storage with more than 100 rooftop solar homes, and is testing different electricity tariff options and retail models.
The island of Ta’u in American Samoa, more than 4,000 miles from the United States’ West Coast, now hosts a solar power and battery storage-enabled microgrid that can supply nearly 100 per cent of the island’s power needs from renewable energy. The microgrid is made up of 1.4 megawatts of solar generation capacity from SolarCity and Tesla and six-megawatt hours of battery storage from 60 Tesla Powerpacks. The whole thing took just a year to implement.
Due to the remote nature of the island, its citizens were used to constant power rationing, outages and a high dependency on diesel generators. The installation of the microgrid, however, provides a cost-saving alternative to diesel, and the island’s core services such as the local hospital, schools and police stations don’t have to worry about outages or rationing anymore.
A few weeks ago, intelligence agencies and IT security consultants became intimately familiar with something called Stuxnet. Stuxnet is a computer virus that monitors and can reprogram industrial systems such as SCADA, a common system used to manage the electrical grid. Like most computer viruses, the origins and purpose are a bit unclear, though many have speculated that the virus targeted Iran and the country’s suspected nuclear program.
What does any of this have to do with cleantech? A lot, in fact. First, it illustrates the fears many have had about the susceptibility of our power grid to cyber attacks. The Department of Energy has been increasingly aware of these dangers, recently awarding $30M to improve cyber security.
Second, and less obviously, it is another selling point for microgrids. Microgrids are localized mini-grids that have their own generation sources (often solar), can be paired with storage, and are connected to the larger (or “macro”) grid. Picture, for example, a mall with rooftop solar panels providing power to the retail shops when it’s needed, selling excess power back onto the grid when it’s not needed, and buying power from the grid if necessary to supplement the mall’s energy usage.
While touting the advantages of the microgrid is worthy of a blog post unto itself, let me briefly point out a few benefits here. Microgrids can dramatically reduce operating costs by cutting energy purchases from the grid to negligible levels. And – if the microgrid is equipped with “smart” interconnection equipment like inverters that can sell energy onto the grid when the price is high and use batteries to store it when the price is low – it can even generate income. Of course, it requires up-front capital to finance purchases of solar panels and the like, but payback periods can be as short as one year.
Other benefits include a reduced carbon footprint (assuming the generation source is renewable), diversification of energy sources, and improved power quality. But, in light of a world vulnerable to cyber attacks that wreck havoc on the grid, perhaps the most important benefit is improved security and reliability that comes from a microgrid’s ability to operate autonomously from the larger “macro” grid. If the larger grid is shut down by a cyber attack, a microgrid can continue operating undisrupted. And a cyber-terrorist’s ability to paralyze an entire economy via an attack on the grid is at least slightly reduced when that attack fails to reach those operating on their own autonomous grids.
Indeed, prominent thinkers in other fields have emphasized the security benefits of moving away from a centralized distribution system to an increasingly de-centralized and autonomous one. One excellent example of this push is Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s famous book The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. Taleb believes that unforeseen and highly improbable events are more difficult to predict than we commonly believe. So instead of just trying to predict and prevent them, we need to consider how to minimize the negative impact of such events when they occur. One way to minimize their impact is to build redundancies into a system. A microgrid that can operate autonomously from the larger grid is one way of building a more redundant and robust system. This is why the United States Department of Defense is a major proponent of microgrids, developing microgrids for military bases and improving its security of energy supplies and sources.
Three years ago, I wrote about the importance of smart electricity microgrids in Brave New War as platforms for networked resilient communities. As a reminder, here's a short synopsis of what a microgrid is (the "smarts" are computer controls and data that allow people to see and manage the generation and use of electricity down to the device level through a simple Web interface):
Microgrids are modern, small-scale versions of the centralized electricity system. They achieve specific local goals, such as reliability, carbon emission reduction, diversification of energy sources, and cost reduction, established by the community being served. Like the bulk power grid, smart microgrids generate, distribute, and regulate the flow of electricity to consumers, but do so locally. Smart microgrids are an ideal way to integrate renewable resources on the community level and allow for customer participation in the electricity enterprise.
At the time when I first wrote about it, most of the interest in the topic was academic, and almost all of the implementations were very, very basic in design (hospitals and military bases, etc.). What a difference three years makes. Smart microgrids are now going mainstream with multiple software start-ups and big efforts underway at Siemens and Cisco. Given this pace of expansion, I suspect that this bottoms up approach will vastly outstrip and eventually curtail any efforts to build smarts into the larger utility grids (which is estimated to cost $165 b in the US alone, money that doesn't exist). Also, with this level of interest, open source efforts are sure to follow.
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