Microgrids



Today, the traditional centralized grid is often suffering from frequent instabilities, outages, and uncertainty. In particular, the outages result in a large number of consumers going for hours, days, or weeks without electricity. The situation is even worse during harsh conditions such as hurricanes, earthquakes, wildfires, and other disasters that not only interfere with the grid but also with the supply chain.

An outage leads to lost productivity while some consumers opt to invest in additional alternative power systems such as fossil fuel generators, which are not only costly but harmful to the environment. Frequent outages often leave most of the consumers uncertain as to whether they will get power throughout the day or not. To overcome these challenges and improve reliability, many institutions, organizations, industrial and commercial consumers are turning to ABB microgrids solutions.

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Grid quality transformation with Microgrids

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Benefits


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Energy efficiency

Optimize energy consumption
levelling peaks in energy demand, while reducing total cost for energy thanks to on-site generation. Unlock new revenues streams through grid ancillary services

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Power reliability

Ensure continuous power supply, 
leveraging on multiple distributed energy resources, like renewables, energy storage, captive generation and utility connection

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Environmental sustainability

Reduce CO2 emissions, 
levelling energy peaks and maximizing the utilization of renewable power generation

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Network security

Segmented architectures facilitate integrated and independent operations with fail safe backup mechanism, ensuring cyber-secure microgrid


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Integrating renewable energy into the Microgrids

The need for financing and technical expertise to efficiently integrate and operate grid-connected microgrid systems has become crucial. Such support is necessary to ensure efficient utilization and a healthy return on investment within the industry. Today, ABB provides comprehensive solutions to seamlessly integrate the microgrid to the grid, and to control and manage each aspect efficiently.

Additionally, ABB provides the technical expertise and consultancy required to plan, design, build, and operate microgrids efficiently and cost-effectively. ABB's line of devices and technologies supports microgrid deployments and helps to address a wide range of existing challenges. ABB Digital Solutions, the system becomes intelligent.

As the utilities digitize the grid, it becomes easier to monitor, manage, and control the assets on-site and remotely. Deploying the appropriate smart grid technologies enables the microgrids to export or import power, to or from the national grid, helping to balance supply and demand. Get in touch with us.

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Microgrid Components and ABB offering

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Operation modes

Isolated

The off-grid microgrids have no physical connection to the main grid, sometimes due to the lack of a nearby or economically viable transmission and distribution infrastructure. Since there they are isolated from the main network, the remote microgrids operate in the island mode throughout their service life. Most of the remote microgrids use renewable sources such as solar, wind, hydro, and others which are more sustainable. A storage system is necessary to provide power when the generation from the sources is low.

Non - Isolated

The grid-connected deployment is where the microgrid has a physical connection to the utility network. In this deployment, the microgrid operates in parallel with the grid, either as the primary or secondary power source. A switching mechanism at the point of coupling allows the microgrid to disconnect from the utility grid and operate in island mode. Further, it can reconnect to the national grid when necessary.

When operating in grid-connected mode, the microgrid offers demand response, voltage and frequency regulation, reactive power support, and other grid services. As such, it helps to improve the power quality and reliability while enabling the utility to meet peak demand requirements without investing in additional generating capacity.


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Explore our solutions and business opportunities

In a world where rapid urbanization, together with the need to reduce CO2 emissions, has created a need for better technology, microgrids can support and protect continuous power flow.

This is a solution for modern utilities that seek smart, highly reliable, and resilient grids powered by clean energy in areas where grid instability is common, but it is also for those who seek new business opportunities and additional services for their customers. Whether it's providing for remote communities or protecting the power flow from emergencies or attacks, ABB’s microgrid technology offers comprehensive solutions to meet every need.

For Microgrid Electricity Market Operators, ABB microgrid solutions offer the ability to control and coordinate their customer’s distributed energy resources and enable those customers to be rewarded for providing services to the broader grid.


Microgrid Power Management Solutions
Microgrid Power Management Controller
Microgrid Smart Power Solutions

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Case studies

ABB Ability™ Energy Management for sites - OPTIMAX®
ABB launches virtual power plants in Japan enabled by ABB Ability
Collaborations with ABB accelerate microgrid developments
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