• Energy Research

[EN] The authors of this paper analyze the use of biogas-powered micro-Combined Heat and Power (micro-CHP) systems for residential microgrids to enhance their resilience during blackouts. With the increasing frequency of natural disasters, ensuring power system reliability has become a critical concern. Microgrids can provide a solution to this problem by integrating distributed energy resources and operating them independently of the grid. The authors of this paper investigate the design and implementation of biogas-powered micro-CHP systems for residential microgrids. The paper concludes with a discussion of the potential of biogas-powered micro-CHP systems as a key component of resilient and sustainable energy systems in the future. SI

Climate-change-related events are increasing the costs of power outages, including losses of product, revenue, and productivity. Given the increase in meteorological disasters in recent years related to climate change effects, the number of costly blackouts, from an economic perspective, has increased in a directly proportional manner. As a result, there is increasing interest in the use of alternators to supply dependable, instantaneous, and uninterruptible electricity. Traditional research has focused on the installation of diesel backup systems to ensure power requirements without deeply considering the resilience capabilities of systems, which is the ability of a system to recover or survive adversity, such as a power outage. This research presents a novel approach focusing on the resiliency impact of backup systems’ storage-free dispatchable solutions on buildings and compares the advantages and disadvantages of biomethane microturbines, natural gas engines, and diesel engines backup systems, discussing the revenue resulting from the resilience provided by emergency generators. The results show that, for several diesel fuel and natural gas safety assumptions, natural gas alternators have a lower probability of failure at the time of a blackout than diesel generators, and therefore, resilience increases.

This research aims to optimize and compare the annual costs of energy services in buildings with critical loads and analyze case studies for hospitals and higher education institutions in the United States. Besides electricity and natural gas costs, the study considers all the infrastructure costs of capital amortization and maintenance. In addition, it studies energy resilience improvement due to distributed generation, including solar photovoltaic, solar thermal, internal combustion engine, and fuel cell sources. The optimization considers the electrical consumption, the heating and cooling demands, and the operational strategy of the energy storage systems. To simulate real scenarios, energy tariffs were modeled and considered, and final optimization results were produced. Some of the microgrid load was considered critical to model resilience benefits. The results show that if favorable energy tariffs are applied, the benefits of increasing energy resilience represent a novel market with high potential in facilities with significant critical loads. This methodology can be used in similar scenarios, adapting each particular load profile and critical load to provide a combined optimal solution regarding resilience and economic benefits.