Investigation on North American Microgrid Facility

Abstract

According to international reports that have also cited in this article, North America covers the 66% of the global electricity that has generated in microgrids. Besides its 2088 MW installed microgrid capacity in 2012, many new microgrids have been installed in North America. The microgrid plants under development, new planned, and proposed will pursue the leading rank of North America all over the world. Therefore, it has intended to analyze the microgrid plants and studies performed in this region to disseminate the findings. This paper presents a review of various North American distributed generation plants together with their tabled test-beds. The microgrid (MG) projects introduced in this study are surveyed according to their generator structures, their integration to the point of common coupling (PCC), and operation structures. The uniqueness of each MG project has shown in comparison to several others. In addition, the emergency and crisis management methods, precautions against overcharge and low generation issues are also introduced for each MG plant. This allows the researcher to visualize today’s microgrid and to gain insight into the possible evolvement of future grids. The study concludes by emphasizing significant findings and by suggesting potential research areas that would enhance microgrid facilities.

Keywords

• Microgrid facility; distributed generation technology; microgrid test-bed; renewable resource