ProtoGen’s Microgrid Navigator (MGNav) is a valuable first step in the design process for your site. Designed with non-technical users in mind, you can begin planning your microgrid with a few simple input fields. The fields in MGNav’s input page determine your site’s energy consumption, its regulatory environment, and its physical constraints. Your information is processed through an optimization engine that establishes PV and battery sizing, and an indicative project budget and cash flow.
Think of this simulation tool as an ideal ‘first pass’ for the microgrid design process.
Solar photovoltaics (PV) and lithium-ion batteries are assumed to be the primary resources to back up your facility in an outage. Depending on state-level regulations, these resources create a varying amount of grid-connected revenue. The optimization maximizes that revenue while also leveraging the system to provide energy resilience for your site.
The MGNav tool was created for facilities with ‘behind the meter’ resources to offset a site’s normal load. PV and battery systems are typically connected at a site’s main electric panel, with a circuit breaker upgrade that ‘islands’ the entire site, or a portion of it. The battery will be the anchor of the islanded system, and in normal conditions, it will charge and discharge to optimize the utility tariff.
The location of your project is important for regulatory and meteorological reasons. The tool implements a lookup function for state-level net metering size limits and will automatically assume and define your site’s PV production, and seasonal and daily load curve.
If your address is sensitive, feel free to provide a simple city address instead (e.g. Charlotte, NC). This will prevent you from using the PV sizing tool, but will otherwise work the same.
The tool will assume your site experiences an extended, summertime outage. That outage period is selected when PV is most productive to avoid oversizing assets. For the dark days of winter, you would need to , depending on the criticality of your load:
*NOTE: Integrating a generator or load shedding is not a selectable option inside of MGNav.
It may be unrealistic for your site’s PV to back up the entire site load (even in the summertime). Your site’s ‘critical load fraction’ is the percentage of total load that remains available during a utility outage. It is capped by the amount of PV your site can produce to avoid an over-reliance on traditional generators.
MGNav will automatically calculate the largest CLF feasible for the maximum PV system defined by default.
If a smaller critical load is preferred, manually adjust the percentage down from 100%. Setting CLF to zero removes the outage period entirely. Such systems will be optimized for grid-connected mode and not provide resilience. Energy storage (and in some cases PV) may not be included in these scenarios if the most economically viable solution is business as usual.
*NOTE: The simplified inputs of the tool do not include every single incentive that your system and tax structure may be capable of benefitting from. Nor does it place an economic value on emissions reduction goals.
A mapping tool helps define the PV space available to your site to define the square footage available. The tool derives power density according to the following table:
| PV Array Type | Space Requirement |
|---|---|
Roof PV |
10W/sqft |
Ground Mounted PV (fixed or single-axis) |
6 acres/MW |
Avoid defining a system or systems where there is shading or other large obstructions. Define the roof planes and canopies individually, where the modules would be located. For ground mounts, create a perimeter around the entire region available. Interrow spacing will be automatically applied.
Where there are multiple PV mounting types, select the majority case. In other words, if you have a large roof space and a small area for a ground mount, use the tool to define the shape of both, but select roof-mount as the array type.
If you know your site’s PV capacity, enter it directly. The mapping tool is not required.
The regulatory paradigm defined in the tool includes the state’s net metering capacity limit and the site’s utility tariff. Net metering can policies vary widely, even within a state. The net metering limits applied in this tool are an approximation, based on information from DSIRE. The target case is the policy mandated for investor-owned utilities (IOUs) for commercial properties.
The capacity limit for net metering is the most important regulatory consideration. Below that size, a site is credited the retail rate for its power exported. Beyond 100% of the annual load, the value of the solar energy is greatly reduced. Avoided cost and wholesale rates may apply but are not automated in the basic version of this tool. Note that the optimization will pursue resilience as a primary objective and may sacrifice the value of exported energy.
If you cannot find your applicable tariff in the dropdown, populate the fixed energy and demand costs for your site.
This tool requires, at minimum, the total annual load for your facility measured in kilowatt-hours (kWh). If 12 months of utility bills are available, please provide the monthly values instead for more accurate results. This simplified model will create an hour-by-hour synthetic profile based on the annual and monthly figures, as well as the building type selected. More detailed analysis can be created for sites with interval data or unique occupancy patterns during more advanced modeling stages.
With the exception of the following parameters that ProtoGen curates, the remainder of the ReOpt parameters are default.
| Parameter | Value |
|---|---|
Roof PV Installed Cost per kWdc |
$ 2000 |
Ground Mounted PV Installed Cost (fixed or single-axis) per kWdc |
$ 2000 |
Battery Energy Storage Installed Cost (energy capacity) per kWh |
$ 800 |
Battery Energy Storage Installed Cost (power capacity) per kW |
$ 100 |
Battery Energy Storage Replacement Cost (energy capacity) per kWh |
$ 400 |
Battery Energy Storage Replacement Cost (power capacity) per kW |
$ 50 |
Battery Energy Storage Replacement Year |
12 |
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