Northwest Electric Power Construction Smart Microgrid

What is the Pacific Northwest smart grid demonstration project?

The Salem Smart Power Center, which hosts a 5-megawatt lithium-ion battery and inverter system capable of storing 1.25 megawatt-hours of energy, was built as part of the Pacific Northwest Smart Grid Demonstration Project, a U.S. Department of Energy research effort.

Are microgrids a key component of the smart grid?

Microgrids have been identified as a key component of the Smart Grid for improving power reliability and quality, increasing system energy efficiency, and providing the possibility of grid-independence to individual end-user sites.

What is a grid forming inverter & a microgrid?

This complexity ranges from the inclusion of grid forming inverters, to integration with interdependent systems like thermal, natural gas, buildings, etc.; microgrids supporting local loads, to providing grid services and participating in markets.

Can a microgrid support unconventional energy storage modeling?

This benefit suggests the need for further extensions unconventional energy storage modeling and the services a microgrid can provide with this type of storage, such as hydrogen. High-fidelity restoration and recovery modeling.

Could a microgrid be a virtual power plant?

Jorge Elizondo, a microgrid engineer and co-founder of Heila Technologies, said that with a controller in each location, energy-sharing becomes more feasible, as does the possibility for an entire neighborhood to serve as an aggregated reserve of power for the main grid: a virtual power plant.

How can microgrids improve the reliability of distribution and transmission systems?

One approach to producing this technology is to demonstrate how microgrids, especially networked microgrids, can help to improve the reliability of distribution and transmission systems by providing them with reserves, i.e., capacity reserve, operational reserve, regulation reserve, etc.