Rhode Island

Post-Secondary Education Facility

2021

For our resilience analysis of this site, muGrid made a few assumptions. First, given that extreme weather events in the northeastern U.S. usually occur with reasonable advance notice, we assumed that a battery storage system would begin a hazard event at full charge. Second, we assessed that critical load during a hazard event would amount to 15% of the typical site load, and that battery storage would be configured to be able to power the site in the event of an outage. Finally, for the purpose of this study muGrid assumed no recharging capability at the site during an outage. We then simulated off-grid performance for a few design cases in the 1-5MWh battery capacity range. Resilience-wise, we saw substantial survivability gains for outages up to 72 hours. Economically speaking, the site was very viable due to Rhode Island’s ConnectedSolutions battery storage incentive (see our report on that topic in collaboration with Clean Energy Group).