A Case Study on Home Microgrid Effectiveness and Resiliency Return on Investment

This paper presents a case study on the economic benefits given from a small scale microgrid, meant to power a small load, over the course of a multi-day outage. This research is done to better determine the value of resiliency, based on previous research conducted by the authors, which only found the value of resiliency, but did not determine how much this would reduce the time a solar plus storage system would receive a Return on Investment (RoI). It gives an analysis of the sizing and loading of the given devices, and determines how long the given system can last during an outage. Using this information, the paper estimates the system's RoI, using the Expected Cost of Service Interruption due to Extreme Events and Avoided Interruption Costs due Solar plus Storage, which use the probability of an extreme outage given area to determine the economic benefit of the added resiliency to the home's system. Though it is small enough to be controlled and managed by a single person, consideration is given to certain smart grid systems that improve safety and longevity. A system's RoI time can be reduced considerably using these metrics.