A PLANNING TOOL TO DESIGN AND VALUATE MICROGRIDS

Microgrids are one of the approaches to increase customer resiliency and reliability to grid outages. Traditionally, Microgrids are deployed with diesel powered generators but there is increasing interests in replacing the fossil fuelled generators with renewables based Distributed Energy Resources (DER). Besides providing resiliency benefit, the DERs can generate additional revenue from participating in market services or by reducing the utility bill. In order to estimate the net cost of deploying a microgrid, it is essential to account all cost components including capital cost, operation, maintenance and replacement costs, if any, and economic benefits that the microgrid can generate from various value streams. This paper presents an open-source software tool called Distributed Energy Resource Value Estimation Tool (DER-VET) that can optimally size DERs for a given location and estimate the net life cycle cost of the microgrid over a given analysis horizon. The tool's architecture, capabilities and features are also outlined in this paper.