Microgrid Celebrations and Design Pitfalls: MGK 2025 Covers Highs to Lows

Such a worthy goal, however, does not offset the precise calculations needed to build one. Good intentions are no substitute for excellent engineering and design labored over before even a single solar panel, battery or generator is laid down.

“Planning starts in the design phase,” Allan Schurr, chief commercial officer of Houston-based microgrid developer Enchanted Rock, said during the final Microgrid Knowledge Conference keynote session in Dallas this week. “If you haven’t designed the right system (the microgrid cannot deliver what’s needed) when it matters. . . You can’t create plans days in advance.”

Schurr and Enchanted Rock, like most living along the Texas Gulf Coast, know from tough experience. The region has been battered by extreme weather numerous times in recent years, including Hurricanes Beryl and Harvey, Winter Storm Uri and a derecho wind event just last year.

Years of planning and the collective mind of expert engineering from multiple fronts are required to right-size a microgrid for a specific critical task. Everything from location to generation, controls and interconnection must be seamlessly integrated to make the intensely complicated and unique thing work the way it was intended.

A microgrid customer may think it wants sustainability and resiliency, but what it wants may evolve as the cost and technical complications stack up. This vacillation in objectives is tough on microgrid designers and their project partners, but tough is what they do.

“It’s always a journey you are going on with a client to help them make a decision,” Geoff Oxnam, CEO of American Microgrid Solutions, said in a Microgrid Knowledge session focused on feasibility and top design pitfalls. “It’s easy to wrap your arms around technical analysis. Equally important is the economic analysis.”

Microgrids can serve multiple roles, and they are not cheap, sometimes penciling out at millions of dollars per MW. Collaboration with all facets of engineering and the end user is the top consideration, these experts say.

For one thing, “you need to get IT’s (information technology) input early and often,” said Ryan Egly, senior project development engineer at Schneider Electric, in the design pitfalls session at the Sheraton Dallas.

Minute calculations are crucial for everything operationally from control system configuration to close loop response times, load shedding and beyond. Even then, the customer may upsize its own demands, which can throw off the balancing needs of the microgrid system.

“The customer shouldn’t add load after the project is done without telling the operators,” Egly pointed out. 

Oxnam sympathized with Egly’s point. “It’s the dreaded ‘what if we just...,’” he noted to humorous recognition from the attendees. “You can get reiterated to death on the project.”

Synchonicity and propagation matters

Microgrid development and commissioning is a delicate balance which requires synchronicity in achieving a seamless transition from construction to interconnection. Making it all work together in a demonstrable way is only good for the future of the industry and the overall grid.

“When big events occur, it’s go-time,” Enchanted Rock’s Schurr pointed out. “If we do well, it propagates more interest.”

Public curiosity around microgrids is certainly growing. Fox News, TIME magazine, the Dallas Morning News and other mainstream entities have covered the subject.

Yet physical build-out at the edge of the grid is still relatively small considering how the overall utility grid is ill-prepared for the future of not only data center and AI expansion, but also EV charging infrastructure, reshoring of manufacturing, industrial electrification and, last but not least, the accelerating pace of extreme weather events.

Imaging a microgrid for an unimaginable outcome

Jaclyn Whiteman, who leads distributed energy operations and maintenance for utility giant Duke Energy, told the story of Duke’s Hot Springs Microgrid as it performed under the duress of the Hurricane Helene flooding which devastated the Asheville and western North Carolina region last year. The 4.4-MW combination of solar and battery storage was never intended to deal with a cataclysmic event like Helene flooding, in which an entire substation was washed away.

But somehow, someway, the Hot Springs microgrid performed a bit of a miracle, sustaining a community in dark days, indeed.

How? Well, it was no miracle, really, but rather an end result of design, integration and thinking way ahead into a challenging energy delivery future.

“If you’re planning on what you knew 10 years ago it’s too late,” said Whiteman, who will be Microgrid Knowledge Conference Co-Chair when the 2026 event happens in Orlando. “You have to plan to oversize. . . and some of it is just luck.”

Cormac McCarthy once wrote that “you never know what worse luck your bad luck has saved you from.” What happened in North Carolina was utter destruction and death, but in a community like Hot Springs a 4.4-MW microgrid achieved a measure of light against the darkness.

And, as noted, the future challenges are rising, whether it’s the weather or the matching the consumption to win the “arms face,” as Garrett Golding, assistant vice president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, said in another Microgrid Knowledge Conference keynote this week.

“We need to throw a kitchen sink of ideas at the problem,” Golding added.

Microgrid Knowledge Conference Co-Chair Ken Horne, who is with Spring Lane Capital, noted that the U.S. alone suffered 27 different weather events last year—each of which caused more than $1 billion in damage or economic impact.

The mission critical and value proposition for microgrids has never been stronger, but it obviously requires intense collaboration and seamless integration at every step of the design phase. Because, as much as we fear physical harm from extreme events, we sometimes worry early and often most about the almighty dollar.

“If it does not match the financial structure (desired by a customer) it’s probably not going to be built,” Nate Mills, vice president of operations at American Microgrid Solutions, said.