Web-Based Economic and Environmental Optimization of Microgrids

Even as distributed generation and distributed energy resources (DER) become a more appealing option to meeting building electricity, heat, and cooling demands, the process of selecting the appropriate equipment mix remains as a complex and time-consuming obstacle. This is the motivation behind Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's (LBNL) development of WebOpt, a flexible web-based software as service (SaaS) approach for optimizing the selection and operation of DER equipment, and running the Distributed Energy Resources Customer Adoption Model (DER-CAM), the optimization platform that supports it. DER-CAM solves energy systems for microgrids [1], [2] (e.g. combined heat and power (CHP) or electric storage) holistically, taking into account service levels for multiple building end-uses, including heating, cooling and electricity. Given an individual microgrid's hourly energy requirements, available technologies and the economic environment as defined by tariff structure, DER-CAM finds the economically or environmentally optimal combination of equipment to install and an optimal schedule to operate it [3], [4].