Strategic Placement and Design of Microgrids using Nighttime Imagery

Natural disasters are increasingly impacting the power availability to communities around the world causing long term blackouts. Rural and remote communities are at a greater risk of suffering longer blackouts due to being lower priority or more difficult to power during the energy restoration efforts. The communities impacted by long term blackouts tend to be economically disadvantaged and remote. Fuel pipelines are unavailable and fuel delivery is interrupted as resources are diverted to higher population areas; this makes the installation of PV plus storage very attractive. This is especially true in the tropics where the solar resource is abundant and the limiting factors, also discussed here, are of a different nature. Utilities may not have a complete picture of the restoration of power across time, this is where previous work done by NASA comes in by providing a time series of the recovery process using nighttime satellite imagery. This work proposes a methodology regarding microgrid planning and critical asset clustering using GIS, census, and the nighttime imagery provided by NASA. The work presents a workflow as well as the decision criteria involved. The aftermath of Hurricane María in Puerto Rico is presented as the test case, with a more detailed example based in the town of Jayuya.