Think Out Loud

Salem to get the state’s first community microgrid

By Rolando Hernandez (OPB)
Nov. 14, 2022 5:28 p.m.

Broadcast: Monday, Nov. 14

By 2023, Southeast Salem will see the state’s first community microgrid. In an emergency, this facility would provide power to six apartment buildings, over 30 homes and a handful of government buildings. Trevor Smith is the public information officer for the City of Salem. Darren Murtaugh is the senior manager of Portland General Electric’s grid edge solutions team. They both join us to share how this microgrid works and what it could mean for the future of Salem and the state.

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This transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. By next year, a neighborhood in South Salem could become Oregon’s first community microgrid, meaning in an emergency, local homes, businesses and city offices would still have electricity. Trevor Smith is the public information officer for the City of Salem. Darren Murtaugh is the senior manager of Portland General Electric’s grid edge solutions team. They join us to talk about microgrids, resilience, and the future of electricity in Oregon. It’s good to have both of you on the show.

Trevor Smith: Hello

Miller: So Darren Murtaugh first, what’s your definition of a microgrid?

Darren Murtaugh: A microgrid is any energy facility that is able to parallel the grid. Meaning during a normal day to day, when you are being served by the grid, the microgrid can deliver energy services back to the main grid. But then in the event that an outage happens on the main grid, it is able to isolate from the main grid and continue to provide reliable service to a customer or a subset of customers.

Miller: Trevor Smith, can you describe the neighborhood in Salem that we’re talking about that is slated to become Oregon’s first community microgrid?

Smith: Yes. So the neighborhood in Salem is a portion of Southeast Salem that houses the Public Works Operations/Shops Complex. Basically, that’s a section of government buildings operated by Public Works to help facilitate the dispatch of their crews for various street projects, sewer projects, all those big bucket trucks and dump trucks are all housed there, and that’s where they’re dispatched from. And then surrounding that is some infill neighborhood, not a large suburban area, but there’s several apartment buildings and several other neighborhood homes in the area surrounding that shops complex.

Miller: Could you give us a sense just for how many people live and work there in total then?

Smith: I can tell you that there is, in this area of the microgrid, about 96 apartments with about 35 other homes surrounding it. So all those families.

Miller: Darren Murtaugh, why do this microgrid in this particular neighborhood in Southeastern Salem?

Murtaugh: It was a little bit serendipitous the way this all came about. PGE has a relatively sizable energy storage project that we’ve been operating since 2012. We refer to it as the Salem Smart Power Center, in proximity to this building that the City of Salem will be putting together. And this storage resource over the years has demonstrated itself to be a critically relied on part of supporting our energy portfolio. But we’re always looking for opportunities to do something more. What else can we do with this?

So when the City of Salem approached us with their project that they’re doing less than a quarter mile away from this energy storage resource, and they expressed an interest in resiliency and what more could we do, pair that with the fact that the Oregon Department of Energy had a grant out for community resiliency, everything seemed to align. We have the investment in the storage, we want to do something more with that, we want to support the community, there is an underserved portion of this that we thought was really appealing to us. And being able to leverage our storage to make the City of Salem’s solar installation that much more powerful, it just made perfect sense for us to be partners in this.

Miller: When you talk about an energy storage resource, an existing one there, I’m just imagining a gigantic battery. Is that right?

Murtaugh: It’s fairly big. It is a battery, it’s enclosed indoors. The building is roughly 100ft x 100ft. It’s an older technology. I mean 10 years ago, in the world of energy storage, that means an older technology by this point in time. If we were to do the project again today, using the latest lithium ion technology, we’d get a lot more energy density out of it. But what we do have is a 5-megawatt, 1.25-megawatt hour battery enclosed in a building.

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Miller: I don’t have a sense for what those numbers mean in terms of the public works buildings that are there or the apartments or or other businesses. So let’s say that there is a really bad ice storm, like Salem and other communities saw in 2021. Power lines go out and people don’t have access to the main regular grid. How long could that battery power people’s homes or businesses?

Murtaugh: It does depend on usage, and whether usage can be managed to be a little bit less than normal during a resiliency event. But in general, I would say the battery is large enough to serve that community for about two hours. When you add the solar to it, depending on time of day, you could potentially extend that duration up to four hours total.

Miller: And the solar, Trevor Smith, that’s part of what’s being added to call this a community microgrid?

Smith: Yes. We are building a brand new public works operations building on our campus, and it will have several rooftop solar panels available to recharge that network and recharge that battery as needed.

Miller: How long was power out in that 2021 ice storm? I’m wondering how long it was out for average customers in Salem.

Smith: I don’t know about the whole city, but there were several customers that were without power for several days. But our hope is that this battery will be able to help people do the basic things, like keep the refrigerator on or operate their home medical equipment that they need to survive. Just help them mitigate the circumstances of those prolonged weather events, so that way they can stay in their homes for a little bit longer. They survive just that much easier without being without heat, and without those necessary electrical devices that everyone needs.

Miller: Darren Murtaugh, I’ve mentioned, because this is the way this project has been described, that this will be Oregon’s first community microgrid. What does that distinction mean? And does it mean that there are already other microgrids in the state right now?

Murtaugh: Yeah, good question. PGE has actually been doing microgrids in partnership with our customers since about 2000. And in fact, just more recently in September 2019, we energized our first clean energy microgrid in partnership with the City of Beaverton at their Beaverton Public Safety Center. It’s a combination of solar plus storage at that facility. PGE owns and operates the energy storage, and the customer brings the solar. We have a similar project to that that will be energizing early 2023 at the Anderson Readiness Center in Salem.

But in both of those cases, these are single site microgrids. The storage, the solar, they’re colocated on one property, serving one customer. What’s different about the community microgrid is the fact that we are pairing a storage facility that is a quarter mile away from the customer solar. And we are using the combination of those, along with a segment of the distribution grid, to serve not one customer, but many customers, going back to what Trevor mentioned. There’s 96 units and six different apartment buildings, and another 35 homes in this microgrid footprint, who will all benefit from this resiliency.

Miller: What would it take to expand something like this to many many more Oregonians, both in terms of the number of homes or businesses that could be on these kinds of microgrids, but also the amount of time they would actually get supplementary power?

Murtaugh: You can break down the challenges and the learnings into two main areas. One is the technical challenges, trying to figure out how we can reliably and dependably design a multi customer microgrid so that it operates in the main grid.

But then the other part is the commercial terms. Just to beat a dead horse here, there are many customers who are benefiting from this microgrid. And going back to what I originally said, how long will the microgrid last when serving customers in an islanded fashion? It depends on usage. So if customers are using a lot of energy, it’s going to deplete the energy resource faster than if they were all acting as responsible as possible in managing their usage, only using their critical loads during a resiliency event. How will you manage that across many, many customers, service-territory wide? I think that’s one of the more complex challenges that we’re trying to gain some learnings about in this demonstration, which will potentially inform how we might roll out a program.

Miller: I can imagine a lot of complications, like how do you get people to not run their air conditioners or to not charge their electric cars, and on and on. But we can check in about those in future conversations.

Darren Murtaugh and Trevor Smith, thanks very much.

Murtaugh: Thank you, Dave.

Miller: Darren Murtaugh is the senior manager of PGE’s grid edge solutions team. Trevor Smith is the public information officer for the City of Salem.

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