grid edge live 2015

We will open this pre-conference with a Microgrid market update from GTM Research. Omar Saadeh, Senior Grid Analyst, GTM Research

Policymakers in the Northeast, Mid-Atlantic, California, and more recently Illinois are increasingly funding or considering incentives to promote the development of microgrids for a variety of applications, most notably resiliency and renewables integration. Creating a policy infrastructure to support this new distribution grid architecture creates a variety of complications from franchise rights to the creation and determination of tariff schemes that fairly distribute costs and benefits. This panel will dive into ongoing regulatory and implementation efforts, developing tariff structures for single and multi-resource microgrids and key legislative efforts to support the continued expansion of the microgrid market. Moderator: Ben Kellison, Director, Grid Research, GTM Research

Developers, vendors and utilities identify microgrid financing as a key barrier to higher rates of deployment. There are considerable challenges associated with financing a project that involves a mix of hardware and software technologies from a variety of suppliers. While avoided energy costs are a clear economic benefit to microgrid customers, revenues from market participation aren't always accessible. Even reliability, a fundamental benefit of microgrids, is difficult to quantify. For these reasons, public funding has been a primary source of microgrid funding. This panel addresses the economic models that are needed to take microgrids into the commercialization phase. Moderator: Andrew Mulherkar, Associate Grid Analyst, GTM Research

This case study will detail a specific microgrid deployment and discuss the various benefits and challenges associated with the highlighted project.

In many respects, microgrids are still a niche market, with a wide range of use cases, technologies and distributed energy resources configurations that give rise to a multitude of system architectures. While disparate approaches have successfully proven microgrid deployments from concept through pilot projects, the resulting costs have been high thereby restricting broader commercialization. This panel will involve developers, policymakers and vendors to evaluate the cost reduction opportunities through project standardization and discuss other use cases that would give way to lower project costs. Moderator: Ravi Manghani, Senior Analyst, Energy Storage, GTM Research