DNV leverages global experience to find the right solutions for local communities through microgrid feasibility assessments

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Understanding Opportunities for Improved Energy Assurance in Local Communities

Microgrids are of significant interest to communities where unstable grid occurrences, extreme weather conditions, and/or earthquake events have resulted in an extended loss of power for local businesses and residents. As electricity becomes more locally generated through distributed energy resources, microgids offer a way to improve the reliability, resiliency, and security of the local grid.

DNV provides assistance to municipalities seeking to understand the opportunities to improve energy resiliency in their communities. Our services include initial planning and identifying potential opportunities as well as distributed generation and microgrid feasibility assessments. For the initial planning, DNV works with community leaders to: 

• Develop an energy baseline for the municipality 
• Perform a critical facilities screening to help understand the impacts of service disruptions based on a simple analysis of cascading effects 
• Facilitate workshops for communicating energy resiliency risks and develop consensus amongst key stakeholders on priority actions and energy resiliency goals 
• Identify and prioritize energy assurance initiatives based on cost-benefit analyses and a set of weighted project selection criteria.

For microgrid feasibility assessments and project development, DNV will support your project through the development cycle, from green-field concept development to commissioning and operational validation. We serve as an owner’s representative providing a full range of microgrid planning and feasibility, design and engineering, and project bankability services including grant application management, asset procurement assistance, project management during deployment and construction, and post-deployment operational verification. We work hand-in-hand with each municipality to site projects, select appropriate technologies and sizes, coordinate with local utilities on interconnections, perform system stability analyses, and develop concept design documents.

Using our established planning processes we are able to identify near-term energy-related assurance projects for the town or city to implement and provide the data needed to support a business case for implementing energy assurance measures. 

Deliverables range from in-depth technical studies, and technical memorandums summarizing potential opportunities to Request for Proposal documents and concept design documents. 

The DNV team brings extensive experience in working with local communities and microgrids. We have simple tools that municipalities can use to get started as well as a proprietary modelling system built to optimize migrogrid assets. We are technology agnostic and provide unbiased owner’s representative services for clean energy project development, community resiliency consulting, and climate planning projects.

Communities across the globe are looking to enhance energy security by electric resiliency measures to protect critical infrastructure such as hospitals, emergency response facilities, town shelters against climate change related events. Communities in close proximity to coastlines are particularly vulnerable to economic and social impacts resulting from electric grid outages.