Quantification of benefits of the campus grid operations as a microgrid
type: CreativeWork
description: The US grid's weak ability to withstand severe weather incidents, particularly with the growing number of events due to climate change, the slow pace of expansion of transmission grids and the increased push to integrate deeper penetrations of renewable resources in recent years, has raised many questions about the reliability and resilience of the electricity supply as well as about the design and operational paradigm of the distribution grid. The increased implementation of microgrids in distribution networks (DNs) indicates that microgrids provide promising alternative approaches to address many of these issues. The growing interest in microgrid implementations provides evidence that many projects are, in effect, able to realize such benefits. However, the lack of a general methodology that can comprehensively quantify the benefits of applying the microgrid concept to any power system limits the much broader implementation of microgrids as the investments made in the microgrid area are not justified. In light of this situation, we developed a quantification methodology and carried out the quantification and comparative analysis of the benefits of the operation of the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana (UIUC) campus utility system (CUS) as a microgrid versus its current operations. The UIUC campus is a microcosm of a city with diverse facilities including the academic buildings and laboratories, student housing facilities, theatres, health center, sports stadiums, libraries, veterinary hospital and an airport. The UIUC campus is critically dependent on the CUS for its chilled water, steam and electricity demands year round. The UIUC CUS has all the required characteristics of a microgrid including distributed energy resources (DERs), critical and non–critical loads and a defined electrical grid boundary. Thus, we may view the CUS as a microgrid. Consequently, consideration of the UIUC CUS via microgrid optics allows us to carry out a comparative quantifica…
abstract: The US grid's weak ability to withstand severe weather incidents, particularly with the growing number of events due to climate change, the slow pace of expansion of transmission grids and the increased push to integrate deeper penetrations of renewable resources in recent years, has raised many questions about the reliability and resilience of the electricity supply as well as about the design and operational paradigm of the distribution grid. The increased implementation of microgrids in distribution networks (DNs) indicates that microgrids provide promising alternative approaches to address many of these issues. The growing interest in microgrid implementations provides evidence that many projects are, in effect, able to realize such benefits. However, the lack of a general methodology that can comprehensively quantify the benefits of applying the microgrid concept to any power system limits the much broader implementation of microgrids as the investments made in the microgrid area are not justified. In light of this situation, we developed a quantification methodology and carried out the quantification and comparative analysis of the benefits of the operation of the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana (UIUC) campus utility system (CUS) as a microgrid versus its current operations. The UIUC campus is a microcosm of a city with diverse facilities including the academic buildings and laboratories, student housing facilities, theatres, health center, sports stadiums, libraries, veterinary hospital and an airport. The UIUC campus is critically dependent on the CUS for its chilled water, steam and electricity demands year round. The UIUC CUS has all the required characteristics of a microgrid including distributed energy resources (DERs), critical and non–critical loads and a defined electrical grid boundary. Thus, we may view the CUS as a microgrid. Consequently, consideration of the UIUC CUS via microgrid optics allows us to carry out a comparative quantifica…
author: Nigam, Siddhartha
language: en
keywords: Microgrid, Quantification, Monte Carlo simulation
date published: 2017-08-10T20:33:24Z
date modified: 2026-07-22T22:24:34Z
provider: University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

PropertyValue
property ID: Handle
value: http://hdl.handle.net/2142/97781