Here’s a case study of how an energy company is using Xendee’s software to improve its sales to potential microgrid operators. For the logistics person, it makes the emergency plan easy to understand and plan for, and in the case of this military base, they planned for 3 days disruption of power as one of the inputs, just to do some scenario planning. For the manager, it balances the CapEx and OpEx and produces slick financial reports.
For the engineers, it balances the inputs and desired outputs and allows them to fluidly lay out multiple scenarios. In the example their sales rep showed me, a military base had implemented the design, integrating a large scale solar array and energy storage on site. Xendee’s software allows users to optimize based on a number of criteria, including limits on type of energy the user wants (and Xendee includes 25 types of fuel options), carbon emissions, and finances. Users can actually bundle loans on multiple energy types with their existing lender. It optimizes for fuel type (whether it’s solar, small scale wind, on-site hydro, etc.) based on the other inputs in terms of resources on site. Xendee worked with Rocky Mountain Institute to develop a financing tool, which is now integrated into its design software. Finally, operating a microgrid profitably can be challenging if things change, as they always do.Īt RE+, America’s largest renewable energy conference, I got the chance to hang out with the folks from Xendee, who were nice enough to walk me through the nuts and bolts of how a large scale microgrid moves from idea to implementation, including site development, configuration, and even financing. Putting together the required reports and data summaries to go get approvable financing is costly and exceptionally fraught with potential pitfalls. Taking the time to find sites that meet programmatic criteria is costly. The first challenge is to set the locations for everything in a microgrid. Control systems, multiple energy inputs, storage, distribution, control panels, and the like, make it much more complex to make sure a community has resilient, carbon-free power at all times. But “more than that” is what larger scale microgrids need. It would get challenged to do more than that. On a microscale (my house, for instance), a microgrid is simple - solar feeds a battery which powers my house when there’s no sun.
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