Impact of emergency diesel generator reliability on microgrids and building-tied systems

Jeffrey Marqusee, Sean Ericson and Don Jenket

Applied Energy, 2021, vol. 285, issue C, No S0306261921000052

Abstract: Microgrids are an emerging alternative as an energy backup system for critical electric loads and have improved performance compared to the traditional architecture where a single emergency diesel generator is tied to an individual building. Both architectures are dependent on the reliability of their individual generators and a quantitative and realistic comparison of the overall system reliability of the two architectures is lacking. Using recently published work on emergency diesel generator finite reliability, a quantitative methodology is presented to compare the reliability of a microgrid architecture based on centralized emergency diesel generators to the traditional approach of generators tied to individual buildings. Three system reliability performance metrics are calculated as a function of outage duration: (1) probability to meet 100% of the critical load; (2) expected fraction of lost load; and (3) probability to meet the highest priority critical loads. It is shown that stand-alone building-tied emergency diesel generators systems, even when two emergency diesel generators are used per building, cannot provide the reliability required to sustain critical loads for a grid outage lasting multiple days. Due to their network configuration and ability to share load, diesel generator-based microgrid configurations are estimated to have ≥ 93% probability of powering all buildings for a 2-week outage there the individual building-tied emergency diesel generator architecture has a ≤20% probability. Microgrids do present other susceptibilities that are site specific and should be considered including vulnerabilities associated with the on-campus distribution system and cybersecurity.

Keywords: Emergency diesel generators; Microgrids; Reliability; Energy resilience; Microgrid reliability; Generator reliability (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

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DOI: 10.1016/j.apenergy.2021.116437

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