The Office of Electricity Delivery and Energy Reliability has selected Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) and Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) as awardees under the Remote Off-Grid Microgrid Design Support Tool Research Call. The purpose of the research call, which was issued in May 2015, was to seek design support tools that can provide decision support analysis on alternating current and direct current remote off-grid microgrids to meet user-defined objectives and constraints for costs and energy system security. One of the requirements was that the developed tool be readily usable by designers of microgrids for off-grid applications in remote communities. A remote community was defined as a distant, isolated, populated area within the Contiguous United States, Alaska, Hawaii, and the territories of the United States where there is either limited or no accessibility to an area electric power distribution system or high costs for electricity attributable to transporting or storing portable fossil fuels for electricity generation.

Each of the selectees will receive $750,000 for Phase I year-long projects. Phase II awards will be contingent on performance during the first phase. LBNL will further develop the Distributed Energy Resources Customer Adoption Model (DER-CAM) into an optimal design support tool for remote, resilient and reliable microgrids in partnership with Los Alamos National Laboratory, Brookhaven National Laboratory, Argonne National Laboratory, General Electric, Burns Engineering, and the Alaska Center for Energy and Power. Oak Ridge National Laboratory will use three proven tools (ORNL Geospatial Viewer (OGV), Microgrid Integrated Energy and Financial Model (MIEFM, and Toolkit for Hybrid Systems Modeling and Evaluation (THYME)) to develop the Microgrid Assisted Design for Remote Areas (MADRA).  ORNL Project partners include the University of Tennessee, ABB, GridIntellect, and the University of Hawaii.  

To learn more about the role that microgrids can play in transforming the nation’s electric grid, click here.