Microgrid Planner: A Distributed Energy Resource Sizing Method

Abstract

We present a heuristic search method for distrubuted energy resource sizing, released in Microgrid Planner, an open-source software platform. Our method is constructed to identify a wide range of microgrid design options that satisfy a given set of power load requirements, allowing a decision maker to weigh trade-offs between potential designs and select preferred solutions. We introduce a global binary search algorithm to build a diverse set of microgrid design options and refine them using a local linear search method.