Power April 2022 Intl - 37

MICROGRID
2. BoxPower SolarContainer with containermounted
solar array in Briceburg, California.
The SolarContainer also includes a
27.2-kW/68.4-kWh lithium ferro phosphate
battery energy storage system. Courtesy:
BoxPower
Blue Lake Rancheria microgrid (Figure
1) allows a small, isolated community
to remain self-sufficient in the event of
storm, seismic, or other grid impacts. Energize
Fresno has deployed a " virtual " microgrid,
enabling local businesses to save
energy, generate clean energy locally, and
create local economic opportunities. The
Berkeley Energy Assurance Transformation
(BEAT) microgrid project ensures that
critical city operations are not disrupted
by larger power system interruptions. And
both the University of California, Irvine
and University of California, San Diego
have large-scale microgrids for research
and reliability purposes.
Evaluating Microgrid Performance
However, even before the results from
new federally funded initiatives are known,
it's important to ask the question: How
well are real-world systems working? Examining
two of the more interesting cases
from California provides an answer.
Liberty Utilities is a regulated utility
with about 50,000 customers on the
west side of Lake Tahoe. Last year, it
was investigating mitigation options to
harden a transmission line serving one
of its customers. The company examined
making upgrades to mitigate the
risk of wildfire, such as installing covered
conductors to its transmission lines that
run through a mountainous area to a remote
research station operated by the
University of California, Berkeley. But after
Liberty's team ran an analysis of cost
and feasibility, they realized it would be
better to de-energize the line during wildfire
season and instead use a containerized
solar/storage system developed by
BoxPower, a privately owned company
based in Grass Valley, California.
According to Amanda Chee, Liberty
Utilities' program manager for Capital Administration
and Planning, the company
was " looking to make certain upgrades to
April 2022 | POWER
target our transmission lines for wildfire
season. In the process of developing the
project for the line, we realized that this
could have been a very expensive project. "
It would have cost about $3 million
to harden the entire four-mile line, which
has 90 poles and serves Berkeley's Sagehen
Creek Field Station. BoxPower's solar/battery
system with propane backup
will allow the utility to de-energize the
lines in summer, according to Chee.
Another example is worth citing here.
In June of last year, BoxPower and Pacific
Gas and Electric (PG&E) commissioned
that utility's first remote microgrid (Figure
2). The central aim of this important
project was to reduce wildfire risk for
customers located in Mariposa County,
one of California's high-fire-threat areas.
The microgrid accomplished that goal.
Propane Backup Delivers Reliability
According to Angelo Campus, CEO and
co-founder of BoxPower, a focus on
achieving complete power reliability was
essential while designing microgrids
for PG&E and Liberty Utilities. " Pairing
propane-fueled
generators
with
solar
power and battery storage ensures a
constant energy supply for BoxPower
customers. Integrating propane for backup
power increases the reliability of the
overall system. Propane fills the niche as
an always-available power source that
smooths out the intermittencies of solar
and wind resources, " he said.
It's becoming clearer with each passing
year that, when combined with solar and
battery systems, propane provides that
essential backup power during extended
periods of low solar production or higher
than expected loads. Campus said, " It
gives BoxPower and our clients the sense
of security needed to deploy solar as a
24/7/365 off-grid power source. "
Combining solar power, battery storage,
and propane-fueled generators also
offers a cost-effective approach to reaching
100% reliability. Campus and his team at
BoxPower have come to the same conclusion
as their customers: " The alternative
option-significantly increasing solar and
battery capacities to account for worstcase
scenarios-leads to underutilized assets
and non-viable project economics. "
BoxPower is currently working to test
and demonstrate hybrid microgrids fueled
by 100% renewable propane, providing
customers with a 100% reliable,
fossil-free energy source. Campus said
that combining solar, battery storage,
and renewable propane will be an affordable,
reliable, and decarbonized approach
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to permanent off-grid power. " I foresee
renewable propane as the future of propane.
Utilities such as PG&E and Liberty
Utilities are prioritizing decarbonization.
When they turn to BoxPower to design
off-grid solar power and battery storage
systems, we suggest propane as a
cleaner burning alternative to diesel for
backup generation, " he said.
Implementing Microgrid Solutions
Black & Veatch is one of the leading microgrid
innovators, and years ago it created
a system for the firm's own global
headquarters in the Kansas City metro region.
According to Randal Kaufman, sales
director for Black & Veatch's Transformative
Technologies business, microgrids
" offer energy resiliency and availability "
and also, depending upon the microgrid,
" predictable costs of operations. "
Kaufman defined resiliency as the ability
to overcome disruptions and maintain
operations. " Availability is very specific
to the uptime, " he said. " They kind of
go hand in hand, but resiliency doesn't
necessarily infer availability. Resiliency
means there may be an outage but you
could react to it quickly and resume operations
with minimal interruption. Availability
is truly the electrons are always
there or they're not. It's really taking a
page from the data center playbook. An
overall metric for utility uptime is 99%,
meaning 1% of the time the power is out
on an annual basis. "
Of course, " microgrid " is a broad,
loose term, meaning different things to
different people. Kaufman thinks that
it should be " a blend of using onsite
generation and storage resources along
with the utility, so the combination is a
higher resiliency and availability than just
the utility alone. It just depends; some
of them are island mode-operating
without the utility-and some are not.
Island mode may be for the economics
of reducing the costs, especially when
you get peak periods, like in California. "
When you add in energy storage and
load-management software, and some
onsite prime generation, it's possible to
reduce demand charge from the utility,
and reduce peak-period energy costs. ■
-Gordon Feller (@GordonFeller on Twitter)
is a leading advisor on energy futures and
provides insights to top executives at
many of the world's leading organizations.
From his Silicon Valley base, he's worked
during 40 years with large companies,
associations, universities, governments,
and international organizations, and he's
published more than 400 articles.
37
https://twitter.com/gordonfeller http://www.powermag.com
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