Title: The Electric Throttle for our Energy Transition
20 Advantages of Community Microgrids
Introduction: After nearly a decade of study, design, development, operations and living in a single home microgrid while interacting with grid managers and delivering presentations, the presenter continues monitoring the world as it makes exponentially growing advances in electrifying everything. Aggregation of multiple single building microgrids leads to community microgrids. The four major technologies of a typical community microgrid are:
1 – Building energy supply increase (renewable solar and wind) and demand efficiency (passive and active)
2 – Near infinite Geothermal heating and cooling using heat pumps
3 – Storage of Electricity (batteries) and Heat Energy (ground)
4 – EVs (electric vehicles as mobile batteries and for transportation)
These technologies, when operating as a single system, are leading the energy transition off fossil fuels while delivering sustainable abundance (20 very significant community benefits). Many benefits are not financial, but they deliver very significant cultural and social value to community residents. There is a significant mismatch between benefits and costs. Microgrids provide a substantial simultaneous winning outcome for the stakeholders – building owners, energy as a service investors (like OREC), community residents and the utility managers.
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