Ongoing issues with COVID-19, the war in Ukraine, rising gas prices and inflation are all impacting the microgrid market, according to Tanuj Khandelwal, CEO of ETAP. “We are dealing with unprecedented levels of compounding crises,” Khandelwal says in a recent interview with Microgrid Knowledge’s Editor-in-Chief Elisa Wood. “Another one could make the entire situation much more unstable than what it is today.”
He says that this is the perfect time to look at our dependency on oil and gas and push harder toward a future powered by renewable energy. Unlike during the energy crisis of the 1970s, we now have mature solar, wind and energy storage solutions that manage system resiliency while keeping sustainability in mind. Microgrids will play a key role in that future, according to Khandelwal.
He predicts that the microgrid market will rethink how it handles energy management systems and that controls for managing distributed energy resources will need to evolve. He notes that ETAP is already seeing a shift in the way customers want to approach their microgrid projects. Rather than buying off-the-shelf hardware that they have to configure and “cross their fingers that these systems will work as well as they hope they would,” customers now want to validate the systems work effectively before deploying them through simulations based on the electrical digital twin model. He says this leads to “better confidence in the success of the project and yields savings quickly.”
ETAP sees many benefits in this model-driven approach because “it’s possible to achieve at least another 20% savings on [a] microgrid project,” according to Khandelwal. “That 20% can make a huge difference in terms of making a microgrid project economical and delivered successfully.”
Learn more about how the microgrid market is changing at the next Microgrid Knowledge conference: Microgrid 2022: Microgrids as Climate Heroes.
