The US Department of Energy (DOE) is working on six strategies to make microgrids “essential building blocks” of future electric delivery.
The strategies are explained in a series of draft white papers being floated by the Office of Electricity Microgrids R&D (MGRD) Program.
With the intent to ultimately create a microgrid road map, the DOE is seeking comment from the public on the white papers by Nov. 24.
The first paper, an overview of the strategy, says that distributed energy resources (DERs) may make up 30%-50% of electricity generation capacity in 10 years, up from 15% today.
That many DERs cannot readily be integrated into the existing grid, which is based on centralized architectures. Microgrids, however, can help.