Microgrids for Community Welfare

There is a lack of papers that model microgrid operations for wildfire resilience and consider how the system’s operation, planning, and growth could vary by urban form. Papers that model microgrid operation in communities impacted by wildfires are generally limited in the sense that they either do not consider the demand of real communities or only focus on select systems that may not be applicable to or provide guidance to communities in the Western U.S. context. 

This research will combine urban planning and grid modeling methods to model microgrid operation, planning, and growth for Western U.S. wildfire communities. Here we define urban form as a community’s density, compactness, land use and land use diversity, and building types, and communities will be classified using the CoreLogic dataset. The individual buildings that make up the microgrid, as described by the CoreLogic dataset, will then be modeled using NREL’s ResStock, ComStock, and ReOpt tools.