Title : Disaster Management
Abstract:
While the increasing frequency of severe weather and visible effects of climate change may make it easier to anticipate the power outages stemming from such events, managing the major health and safety disasters created by widespread power loss remains a formidable challenge across the globe.
Just last summer, South America experienced massive electrical failure that impacted Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay. It is becoming clearer that the grid of the future must deliver greater resilience, higher levels of service, and increased sustainability.
Commonwealth Edison, (ComEd), the largest electric utility in the state of Illinois, serving 70% of the state’s population, sees the distributed, modular grid as central not only to future power system design but to enhanced disaster preparedness, damage mitigation and expedited restoration of outages..
ComEd’s Bronzeville Community Microgrid (BCM) will be connected to a microgrid on the campus of Illinois Tech, creating the first utility-operated microgrid cluster in the nation. The BCM is capable of operating independently from the grid, or islanding, providing continued, life-saving services not only to the neighborhood that leverages the microgrid, but to the surrounding areas as well. This paper will outline the many ways Bronzeville Community Microgrid can be utilized for disaster management, in both the Bronzeville neighborhood and its connected areas, along with ComEd’s overarching vision for scaling this project for a distributed, resilient, and sustainable 21st century power system.
