When Hurricane Maria battered Puerto Rico in 2017, winds snapped trees and destroyed homes, while heavy rains transformed streets into rivers. But after the storm passed, the human toll continued to grow as residents struggled without electricity for months. Five years later, power outages remain long and frequent.
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To provide more affordable, reliable and sustainable electricity to underserved communities like these, scientists from the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory are partnering with local organizations, nonprofits and universities to build resilience into independent microgrids powered by renewable energy. ORNL is developing a technology that will manage groups of small microgrids as a cluster, enhancing their reliability even when damaged.
Microgrids are small networks that generally have their own energy supply from nearby renewable sources like wind and solar. If battery storage is added, microgrids can be isolated and function independently in “island mode” when the broader utility network fails.
ORNL engineers Ben Ollis and Max Ferrari are leading a team to develop a microgrid orchestrator to deploy in the Puerto Rican town of Adjuntas. A community microgrid project is already being installed there, through a partnership between local nonprofit Casa Pueblo and the Honnold Foundation.
Honnold, which funds solar projects to reduce global energy poverty, is investing $1.7 million to create two microgrids with solar and battery storage, said Honnold project coordinator Cynthia Arellano. The solar arrays were installed last year and will be hooked to the remaining infrastructure being added this year.
That’s where ORNL steps in: Creating a novel orchestrator tool to manage a cluster of microgrids so they directly support and communicate with each other, making them more resilient during long power outages. For example, if one microgrid loses part of its solar generation, the adjacent microgrid could export power to its neighbor, minimizing the impact of the damage.