Microgrid Design Toolkit Evaluation and Trade-offs Analysis for Rural Community in Cayey Puerto Rico

Puerto Rico's power infrastructure was devastated by the passage of Hurricanes Irma and Maria in 2017. It highlighted the lack of resilience of the system and left the island with unreliable electric service for years after. Community leaders are looking for reliable alternatives to supply their energy needs. Three microgrid design alternatives are evaluated for a rural community in a mountainous region in Puerto Rico. The three alternatives consider centralized and decentralized options for diesel generation and energy storage in lithium-ion batteries, while having distributed roof-mounted photovoltaic generation. The trade-off space of solutions for the three alternatives is presented in the form of a Pareto frontier. Optimization results for the centralized alternative slightly favor diesel and cost seems attractive. Less aggregated alternatives favor solar generation, making it the preferred alternative, especially to take advantage of Puerto Rico's net energy metering program.