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

Microgrids are sustainable

Microgrids need connectivity

Microgrids are reliable

Microgrids are resilient

Microgrids are cybersecured

Vehicle-to-microgrid

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Microgrids are sustainable

Using renewable energy, which is not exhaustible like fossil fuels, microgrids are more sustainable. They do not emit harmful carbon dioxide and are therefore environmentally friendly. Sustainable microgrids are a crucial solution in the fight against climate change and increasingly common natural disasters. ABB microgrid solutions are also designed for a green power sources.

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Microgrids need connectivity

Through the digital solution, microgrids leverages real-time operational data from your equipment and delivers predictive analytics and insights that will help you make timely decisions to optimize the performance of your assets, anytime, anywhere. We are offering an ecosystem of digital services supported by Virtual/Augmented reality that increases efficiency and utilization of assets and reduces operational expenses. The connectivity of smart assets and condition monitoring devices keep your operations running and deep-in fence secured.

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Microgrids are reliable

By tapping renewable energy from microgrids during peak demand, utilities can save money. If the current generation cannot meet the demand, the utility can draw the energy from the microgrids storage systems. Such a scheme benefits both the microgrid operator, who gets extra income, and the utility since it can meet peak demand without investing in additional generating plants and transmission infrastructure. Our solutions enable you to maximize renewable use, providing a day-ahead optimization based on weather and load forecasts, real-time optimization to balance fluctuations in supply and demand, and dynamic load shedding to ensure grid reliability.

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Microgrids are resilient

They play a critical role during emergencies such as storms, hurricanes, and other hazards that disrupt the grid transmission lines. In such cases, the controllers automatically or manually disconnect and isolate the microgrid from the national grid, hence making it immune to any failures or problems affecting the main system. Other than the grid- connection, the microgrid provides a cost-effective solution to meet energy needs for marginalized communities in remote areas not served by the utility grid.

Resilience is probably one of the main reasons for microgrid adoption. When islanding, a microgrid continues to supply power to the local load, even when the grid is down. The operation ensures uninterruptible supply and hence provides benefits such as reliable and high-quality power. By preventing outages, the microgrid ensures continued operations, productivity, and safety, hence it’s a big plus to critical institutions such as hospitals, service, and manufacturing industries.

ABB’s Microgrids Solution minimizes the consequences of extreme weather or malicious physical or cyber-attacks, helping our customers to be prepared for such extreme events and react accordingly and in a timely manner.

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Microgrids are defense-in-depth against cyber attacks

The goal of a microgrid is to increase the reliability of critical mission loads. It is crucial that the control system operating a microgrid be secure against adversarial attacks. Learn more about ABB cybersecurity here.

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Vehicle-to-microgrid storage and vehicle-to-building resilience

Microgrid developers can integrate EV charging stations to charge the electric vehicles and increase storage capacity. In case of a disaster, that affects the entire grid and connected chargers, the microgrid will keep the EVs charged. Additionally, EVs can function as storage systems to save surplus energy. The utility or microgrid can then tap into the EV storage and provide power to the domestic and business consumers during a disaster or peak demand, hence providing vehicle-to-building resilience. Generally, an electric vehicle battery carries a significant amount of energy that consumers can use in times of need.

Learn More about Vehicle-to-Grid.

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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.