DOE DC microgrid scoping study - opportunities and challenges

For the Department of Energy, several national labs (Los Alamos, Lawrence Berkeley, Oakridge, Sandia, Argonne, and Pacific Northwest) collaborated on a scoping study1 to provide a preliminary examination of the benefits and drawbacks of potential DC microgrid applications relative to their AC counterparts. The performance of notional AC and DC microgrids are estimated and compared using several metrics: safety and protection, reliability, capital cost, energy efficiency, operating cost, engineering costs, environmental impact, power quality, and resilience. The initial comparison is done using several generic microgrid architectures (see Fig. 1) to reveal the importance of the different metrics. Then, these metrics were compared for several specific microgrid applications to draw out possible unique advantages of DC microgrids. In this manuscript, we focus on the comparison using the generic architectures in Fig.1. The draft report provides recommendations for potential future research and deployment activities. The draft report provides recommendations for potential future research and deployment activities.