Resilience analysis of renewable microgrids for commercial buildings with different usage patterns and weather conditions

Recent natural disasters and extreme weather have caused significant damage to the electric grid infrastructure and long power outages to customers. As a result, microgrids are being considered as a strategy to increase the resilience of electric power systems. In this work, we performed a resilience analysis of renewable energy hybrid microgrids with different building types in three locations with divergent renewable resources. Firstly, we calculated the probability of surviving a random outage of any length for a photovoltaic (PV) and battery system. Secondly, we used Homer Grid software to simulate multiple system configurations, including PV, wind, battery storage, and generator, and discussed economic and resilience outputs. The main contributions of this study include a new metric to quantify resilience in electric power systems, comparing the effect of weather and load patterns on resilience, and a methodology to select the worst and best-case outages for PV + battery systems. Using the proposed metric we found that regarding load type, resilience in a hospital is 40% larger than a hotel due to the hospital having a daytime peaking load which is a better match to PV generation. Regarding the impact of location, we found only 10% better resilience in sunny Tucson, AZ as compared to windy Sioux Falls, SD. Additionally, wind and solar complement each other to survive a 3-day outage in the commercial buildings under consideration in all three locations. When the value of lost load is included in the economic analysis, battery systems with autonomy as large as 12 h in combination with PV, wind and generator are more cost-effective than the baseline configuration. We believe that the adoption of renewable microgrids with battery storage will play a key role in the transition to the resilient smart grid of the future.