Sandia National Labs to help fix Sandy-damaged electrical grid

Energy secretary Ernest Moniz and New Jersey governor Chris Christie announced a partnership to design a smart microgrid system to keep public transportation in the Newark, Jersey City, and Hoboken areas running when the central grid goes down. Sandia National Laboratories, whose microgrid designs are in place at more than 20 US military bases, will design the microgrid for NJ Transit, the nation’s third-largest public transportation system, carrying 900 000 passengers daily.

The project, announced on 26 August, has the stated goal of increasing the resiliency and reliability of electricity needed to power trains, stations, and other transportation facilities. Last year’s Superstorm Sandy caused severe flooding and damage to the transit agency’s infrastructure and trains and demonstrated the need for such an initiative.

The microgrid could employ existing railroad rights of way to transmit power between generation sites, facilities, and rail lines in Jersey City, Kearny, Secaucus, Hoboken, Harrison, and Newark. Railroad facilities and lines in those communities represent the most crucial and the most vulnerable corridor in the agency’s rail system and, Moniz noted, are also a major emergency evacuation route for Manhattan.

“This first-of-its-kind electrical microgrid will supply highly reliable power during storms and help keep our public transportation systems running during times of natural disaster, which is critical not only to our economy but also emergency and evacuation-related activities,” Christie said at the announcement. Moniz called the microgrid “a model for developing a 21st-century grid” that would potentially link more than 50 MW of existing distributed generation, such as solar and wind, in the area. In recovering from Sandy, he said, “We have to rebuild in a smart way, in a way that prepares the energy infrastructures not for the last storm but for the next storm, for the next possible major interruptions.”

The project will make use of a quantitative risk-based assessment tool developed at Sandia to evaluate communities’ regional energy needs and identify cost-effective solutions for an improved electric grid. Sandia-designed microgrids at military bases integrate distributed energy resources such as backup generators, local photovoltaic systems, small wind turbines, and energy storage into a local electrical distribution service area.

A key feature of a microgrid is the ability during a grid disturbance or outage to separate and isolate itself from the utility seamlessly with little or no disruption within the microgrid. Then, when the utility grid returns to normal, the microgrid automatically resynchronizes and reconnects itself in an equally seamless fashion.

In a 26 August speech at Columbia University, Moniz said extreme events like Sandy “are likely harbingers of things to come; scenes that will likely be repeated as carbon emissions from human activity threaten to alter the climate consistent with the longstanding expectations of the climate science community.”