Resilience and Cost Trade Space for Microgrids on Islands

This article examines the trade space between the resilience and cost of an island microgrid. The article presents two models for the resilience and the cost of the microgrid. The resilience model considers the invulnerability and recoverability of the microgrid and represents the power balance of the microgrid, energy storage, and maintenance policies. The cost model adapts the levelized cost of energy measure to the context of island microgrids. We conduct experiments to investigate two microgrid architecture decisions of how much excess generation capacity and redundancy to provide. The experiments show that redundancy of generative sources provides greater resilience for similar cost, and resilience improves quickly as excess power capacity is added while the cost grows more slowly. Case studies for island microgrids show how a redesign of the microgrid can improve resilience without increasing costs. The article contributes to the literature a model for decisions makers to evaluate the tradeoffs between resilience and cost for island microgrids that must depend on their own distributed energy resources.