You may have heard of microgrids in passing, maybe at a town meeting or when the future of your electricity supply is under discussion. Mostly, they aren’t headliners like data centers.
However, microgrids are becoming an important part of the future electric infrastructure. They provide a valve to release some of the pressure building up to supply more electricity to data centers and transportation.
Burns & McDonnell, an architecture, engineering and construction firm, figures that by 2030, 50 percent of in-city deliveries will be made with electric vehicles of all types, and these will have to be charged daily.
There are 700 microgrids operating in the United States, and 7,000 are planned or under construction. While they got off to something of a slow start, they are now going full-speed ahead.
Originally, microgrids were seen as appropriate for military bases, college campuses, and other uses with a defense or social purpose, or for remote locations far from the grid.
Utilities were cool or actively hostile to them, although it can be argued that the first microgrid was established by Thomas Edison in Manhattan.
One utility executive said to me four years ago, “What is it about ‘micro’ that the promoters don’t understand?” Now utilities are beginning to embrace microgrids as part of the solution, not a raid on their customer base.
A microgrid, as explained by the futurist-entrepreneur Chase Weir, CEO of Distributed Sun and its spinoff truCurrent, is a way of bringing “kilowatt-hour liquidity” to the electricity industry, smoothing out the periods when demand meets maximum capacity, often beginning as the sun sets.
It is a self-contained electric generation and localized distribution entity, using storage, renewables, and, at times, traditional generation to create a grid that can operate either independently of the national grid or be connected to it. It is usually separated from but linked to a utility.
Oisin O’Brien, senior director of commercial solutions at truCurrrent, walked me through the dynamics of a microgrid that the company is building for a large food distribution company in Northern California.
Its assignment was to develop a charging station for 30 Daimler electric-tractor trailers used for food distribution. The challenge: To provide 2 megawatts of power for charging the Class 8 trucks during largely off-peak hours. Each truck has a 200-mile range on a single charge and must be charged daily.
On this project, O’Brien explained, truCurrent is working closely with the local utility, PG&E. “We were able to harness the utility’s flexible service program,” he said.
The full power plant — which is awaiting permission to operate from PG&E — will team 800 kilowatts of solar power with battery storage to create a contained system.
Currently, solar collectors are being installed on the facility’s roof, but two dozen of the company’s trucks are already using the charging points in the parking lot. The 180-kilovolt (which equals 1,000 volts) fast chargers can fully recharge a truck in three to four hours.
This first-of-a-kind pilot is remarkable in that it has brought “speed to power,” going from contracting to charging in 13 months. It meets the food distribution company’s need to charge when they need to, provides resilient backup and load flexibility, and provides a price hedge at a time of record-high diesel prices.
“Our solutions are only becoming more valuable as cost, reliability and power availability worsens,” Weir said.
According to O’Brien, truCurrent has plans to deploy microgrids nationwide, using a system of turnkey installations where the infrastructure is owned and operated by the local company or the community, but the planning, procurement and installation is provided by truCurrent.
“This project was driven by regulatory pressures in California, the company’s sustainability targets, and the increasing economic benefits with updated analysis, showing lower operating costs for electric fleets compared to diesel (pre-Iran war calculations),” O’Brien said.
The truCurrent project is for transportation usage, but there is a growing demand for microgrid deployment in suburbs and even in apartment complexes.
It is an example of Weir’s vision for the electrical grid of the future, which, in addition to liquidity and speed, must be designed for abundance and affordability.
The project “turned every challenge into an advantage for the developer, the customer, the utility and capital markets,” Weir said.
Shared prosperity with a microgrid: What’s not to like?
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