A researcher at the Alaska Center for Energy and Power (ACEP) has designed a program meant to help small communities make big energy decisions.
The new tool, called MiGRIDS Lite, aims to simplify modeling the addition of renewable energy sources to rural microgrids. And it’s free.
ACEP Research Engineer Bax Bond has been working on MiGRIDS Lite off and on for the last year. He’s from Tununak, a village of about 400 on Alaska’s west coast, and is also a graduate student at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.
MiGRIDS Lite is now downloadable from a platform called GitHub. Its development is one piece of a multi-part, $3 million grant from the National Science Foundation.
The tool leverages the programming language Python to perform some of the complex calculations involved in judging how to bring renewable energy sources into microgrids. Those are small-scale, isolated grids that Bond describes as “electrical islands.”
In Alaska, microgrids primarily run on diesel. But the tool’s use isn’t necessarily restricted to the 200-odd microgrids in Alaska or the 700-odd microgrids in the U.S.
“Grid-modeling software takes technical skills. It takes big budgets. You don’t have that in a lot of rural areas anywhere in the world: Alaska, Northern Canada, Africa, just to name some really broad regions,” Bond said in a recent interview.
MiGRIDS Lite may not be a silver bullet, but Bond said the tool does fill a gap between educated guessing and those more robust programs that can require considerable expertise and money.
“It’s a step above back-of-the-envelope calculations, but it doesn’t have all the computational, budgetary, staffing needs for, like, way more complicated modeling,” he said.
To demonstrate, Bond brought out his laptop and started typing.
He imported MiGRIDS Lite and some energy load data. Then, he plugged in a few values that represented things like the sizes of the new energy source under consideration, and a potential energy storage system, like a battery.
Bond entered a few more numbers to build out the existing, hypothetical powerhouse, in which he includes two generators: one 400 kilowatts, the other 500 kilowatts.
From there, Bond didn’t have to do much else. The whole process took less than 10 minutes, at least for him.
“And then, this is where all the magic happens,” he said, before getting the final output.
The end products are bar charts colored green, orange and blue. Taken together, Bond said they represent how much diesel a community could offset in the scenario he provided the program.
“This output shows how much fuel you can save, and in this case, it shows that a battery is going to make a big difference,” he said.
Bond then scrolled back up into the program to tweak the values a couple more times, producing new charts for each example. And the battery didn’t always make a big difference, sometimes adding little to no benefit. But that’s part of the point, and part of why Bond says MiGRIDS Lite could be handy for something like writing grant proposals.
“It shows, like, how varying each of these parameters change how the grid behaves,” he said.
Because of its aim for simplicity, the tool does have some limitations. For instance, while it considers the general variability of renewable energy sources, its calculations don’t distinguish between different types, like wind or solar.
And the uptake of MiGRIDS Lite is yet to be determined. It’s brand new, after all. As of Thursday afternoon, though, the GitHub page was showing eight unique downloads and about 40 page views.