Resilience improvement in office buildings with critical loads

Abstract

This chapter analyses the benefits from both a business-related and energy resilience perspectives provided by a microgrid based on photovoltaic solar energy/electrochemical storage. We present a case study that demonstrates how a microgrid can be used to an office building not open to the general public (that is, for the exclusive use of office building employees). In this case study, we first identified how, by using distributed resources (in particular, photovoltaic solar panels and electrochemical storage), the microgrid life-cycle cost of energy can be reduced for a “normal” (connected to the electrical network) operation mode. Next, we evaluated how these technologies can be added to the microgrid to increase the resilience of the network—the resilience has been quantified based on the period length the microgrid is able to sustain an electrical consumer at an outage. It was found that, by adding photovoltaic solar energy and electrochemical storage, it was possible to extend the amount of time that the microgrid could survive a power cut from the current impossibility (= zero hours) to an average of four hours for the solar photovoltaic/electrochemical storage system proposed. Even in the event that there was a cut in the supply of the conventional electricity grid, the microgrid could continue feeding the loads of the office building not open to the public. We found that the microgrid could save $112,410 in energy over the 20-year life cycle of the facility, while increasing the amount of time it can survive a power outage. The analysis carried out can be applied to other sites interested in quantifying the energy, economic and resilience benefits of the use of distributed resources based on renewable energies.