Edgartown is a tourist destination on the island of Martha's Vineyard. Photo from Getty Images

There is no bridge to the island of Martha's Vineyard from mainland Massachusetts: If you want to get there, you have to take a ferry or plane. The island's remote nature does not discourage tourists from visiting the small town of Edgartown—its population balloons from 5,000 to 25,000 during the warm summer months. But it does present problems for addressing power outages year-round.

When the tourists pack up their beach umbrellas and head back home, hurricanes and nor'easters are soon to follow. Without easy access to mainland resources, residents need independent, resilient energy sources to weather such storms.

"Our long-term plan is to make our municipal facilities sufficiently resilient so that we won't have to worry about power during emergencies," said Edgartown Energy Committee Associate Alan Strahler. Strahler has been working with the committee since 2017 to identify projects to enhance energy efficiency and resilience. "Our goal is to provide up to seven days of local independent operation of emergency facilities during power outages in both winter and summer."

To reach this goal, Edgartown plans to develop microgrids at town buildings. In a microgrid, the buildings can be powered by solar photovoltaics (PV), battery energy storage, grid power, or a backup generator. The microgrid normally selects the cheapest energy source, but when grid power goes out, it operates independently using the remaining energy sources.

In pursuing this plan for its community, Edgartown sought expertise from researchers through the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE's) Energy to Communities (E2C) program. E2C's Expert Match offers a three- to four-month technical assistance program that pairs communities with researchers at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and other national laboratories to help them address near-term energy goals.

"Edgartown wants to create its first microgrid designed to support town buildings in power outages," said Amanda Krelling, a researcher with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and lead for Edgartown's Expert Match support. "Microgrids would create more security and safety for their residents while they potentially have to wait for someone off of the island to come fix the outage."

Generating Options Tailored to Community Needs

The community applied to E2C Expert Match with a microgrid location in mind: the Edgartown Highway Department and its adjacent campus.

"We wanted to understand how we could describe a project that would be worth the investment and have the proper benefits in terms of energy generation, resilience, and savings from a quantitative perspective," Strahler said.

The campus consists of five buildings, ranging from 300 square feet to 10,000 square feet. Krelling began the analysis process with collection and review of available building data, including utility bills, building materials, satellite imagery, and even roof color.

"Roof color can affect energy consumption. Light-colored roofs reflect more solar radiation and dark-colored roofs absorb more," Krelling said. "So, it is an important detail to consider when you are modeling electric loads for buildings."

The highway garage building is one of several buildings that can accommodate solar panels on the Edgartown Highway Department campus. Photos from Edgartown Highway Department

The building data that Krelling collected helped her calibrate models for the Distributed Energy Resources Customer Adoption Model (DER-CAM). DER-CAM describes changes in building energy loads through different generation options and allows users to optimize the portfolio, size, and placement of distributed energy resources based on specific goals.

Using DER-CAM, Krelling created generation options based on four strategies, moving from lowest generation potential to the highest. The first strategy, with a PV capacity of 27 kilowatts and no battery storage, focused solely on meeting electrical loads during power outages and reducing energy cost during normal conditions. Strategy two, with 84 kilowatts of PV capacity and 62 kilowatt-hours of battery capacity, and strategy three, with 270 kilowatts of PV capacity and 40 kilowatt-hours of battery capacity, could each support independent building operation during both power outages and normal conditions. Strategy four maximized the total solar PV installation area available with a PV capacity of 429 kilowatts and battery capacity of 39 kilowatt-hours and generated excess energy to be sold to provide town income.

"Developing solar on an island isn't always easy because of the limited space. You have to look at the use case of the location and how you can align it with the solar project," said Edgartown Energy Committee Associate Erich Mettler, who has a professional background in development and operation of utility-scale solar projects. "The Expert Match team did a good job of looking at those different use cases and actually finding ways to make the facility work better."

Providing Crucial Insight for Decision-Making

DER-CAM modeling provided projections for energy generation, cost, and revenue for all four generation strategies, laying out how each could potentially work for the community. This data ultimately gave Edgartown the information they needed to pursue next steps for the microgrid, including studies to further explore and outline the technical feasibility and design. While Expert Match does not directly assist communities with the process of applying for grants, the analysis provided can contribute to a successful application—as it did for Edgartown.

"We used this information in a grant application for an engineering study of the possible microgrid, and we wound up getting it," Strahler said, referring to a $30,500 grant received through DOE's Energy Efficiency and Conservation Block Grant Program. "I really think one of the reasons we got it is because Expert Match had done all the homework for us. It was a wonderful education and joy for me working with the team, getting the results, and seeing how the modeling worked."

The energy generation projected in these strategies also provides an avenue for the community to continue building up the site with additional capabilities, such as an electric vehicle charging station. Further analysis through Expert Match showed that the microgrid's energy resources could even accommodate a heat pump for space heating of the main building without significantly diminishing the microgrid's renewable energy output or altering the electric load.

"It is a very enriching experience to work with these communities," Krelling said. "Even though this was only an initial analysis, you can see how excited they are about this idea. Our work gave them insight into how they can move forward."

The Edgartown energy committee hopes that the lessons learned from this project will go on to benefit the five other towns of Martha's Vineyard.

"The island has several energy committees, and if this is successful, I hope that they would look at doing projects similar to this," Mettler said. "I think this effort can elevate thinking about ways to be more efficient in our energy usage in our community."

Expert Match applications are accepted and reviewed on a rolling basis. Learn more about all of E2C's program opportunities and apply on the E2C Expert Match webpage.

E2C connects community-based groups, local governments, utilities, and other organizations with national laboratory experts to close the gaps between communities' energy ambitions and real-world deployment. The technical assistance offered through E2C can offer meaningful insights around energy decision-making to help communities achieve resilient, abundant, reliable, secure, and affordable energy systems that embody local and regional priorities. For example, E2C analysis can provide insights on the costs and benefits of electric vehicles, geothermal systems, or capturing and storing solar energy. Such analysis provides community-specific information on the funding and support needed to bring energy projects to fruition.