History tells us that disasters tend to spur new interest in microgrids. This pandemic is no exception as COVID-19 strains hospitals, data centers and food distribution and delivery systems, making power outages unthinkable.
A quote in the Wall Street Journal by Peggy Noonan, being widely circulated on social media, sums up how important electricity is right now:
“There are a million warnings out there on a million serious things. We add one: Everything works — and will continue to work — as long as we have electricity. It’s what keeps the lights on, the oxygen flowing, the information going. Everything is the grid, the grid, the grid.”
Underscoring this idea the US Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners yesterday urged state authorities to designate utility workers as essential to the nation’s critical infrastructure during the pandemic.
In addition, many utilities and state commissions throughout the US have taken quick action to prohibit power shut offs to customers who are behind on their payments. That takes care of lack of power due to economics, but it’s not so easy to control outages brought by nature. And unfortunately both hurricane season and California’s wildfire season are threatening to collide with the pandemic.
Short and long term prognosis
“Human contact is restricted, there are a lot of people ill, the hospitals are overflowing. The last thing anyone would want to worry about is the availability of power supply,” said Shashank Pande, software solutions architect for utility control center solutions at Siemens Digital Grid. “Microgrids are especially important from the resiliency standpoint in this situation.”
Businesses, institutions, utilities and others install microgrids for varied reasons; some are motivated by economics, others environment. But energy resiliency is the technology’s signature value. Microgrids, which operate 24/7/365, provide electric reliability by islanding from the grid during a power outage and using their own on-site resources to supply power to their customers.
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