The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Electricity Delivery and Energy Reliability (OE) held the Microgrid Workshop on July 30-31, 2012, at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) facilities in Chicago, Illinois. This workshop was held in response to path-forward discussions at the preceding DOE Microgrid Workshop, held in August 2011, which called for sharing lessons learned and best practices for system integration from existing projects in the U.S. (including military microgrids) and internationally. In addition, the purpose of this workshop was to determine system integration gap areas in meeting the DOE program 2020 targets for microgrids and to define specific R&D activities for the needed, but unmet, functional requirements. These activities will serve as the basis for the DOE Microgrid R&D roadmap. The DOE program targets, affirmed at the August 2011 workshop and documented in the workshop report,1 are to develop commercial scale microgrid systems (capacity <10 MW) capable of reducing outage time of required loads by >98% at a cost comparable to non- integrated baseline solutions (uninterrupted power supply plus diesel genset), while reducing emissions by >20% and improving system energy efficiencies by >20%, by 2020.
A workshop planning committee with representatives from four national laboratories, three universities, and two consulting firms involved in microgrid initiatives was assembled to develop the workshop process and sessions. Additionally, committee members provided nominations of experts and practitioners to the DOE for invitation to the workshop.