Description
To try to wrap up the microgrid definition discussion I've captured in this document the the most prevalent characteristics from previous posted sources -- by no means an extensive set, but just enough to get a sampling of the diversity of thinking in the area to help determine what is in scope for EMIX -- and marked similarities and areas of contradiction/divergence.
Characteristics that were common to most definitions are in green and what I perceive as contradictory characteristics (they offer a view that is contradictory to another view) are in red -- both open for discussion. If none of the red characteristics are of a concern to EMIX, we can discard. For the rest (green and black) we should decide if they are drivers for EMIX (in scope) or not, and if so, make sure we've included support for those features/capabilities in the spec.
The microgrid concept seems to span the breadth from literal physical islands to virtual power plants and community choice aggregators, each with their own scenarios for energy generation and distribution. The areas of agreement are the more common concepts of you can expect (DER, better efficiency, economics, source diversification, etc). Not much contention there.
Areas of contradiction appear to revolve around these four topics:
1. architecture
(some propose decentralized peer-to-peer coordination,
others expect centralized hierarchical control)
2. two-way or one-way power flow
(some proposed a single direction of power flow,
others proposed the microgrid for ancillary services)
3. size
(some propose a microgrid should be less than 1MW,
others have no restrictions on generation capacity)
4. connection points
(some proposed only a single connection point,
others assumed more of a decentralized integration/connectivity)
-Anne
