The City of Santa Monica, often recognized for its climate friendly policies, embarked on a microgrid project to incorporate renewable energy generation, storage, and electric vehicle charging. 

The City received a $1.5M grant from the California Energy Commission’s Electric Program Investment Charge (EPIC) to run a feasibility study and design a microgrid. The microgrid would provide clean, reliable power to the City Yards municipal facility and potentially incorporate adjacent sites, including commercial development, transit use, and museums. 

Arup was the lead consultant to the City of Santa Monica in the development of the microgrid project. Aligning efforts with the City Yards redevelopment, Arup conducted an 18-month study and produced a multi-user microgrid feasibility analysis, examining socioeconomic, financial, and technical factors, as well as the knowledge transfer plan for the City.  

Arup’s feasibility study was an important step to determining the standards for microgrid development in California, providing necessary stepping stones for local governments, financial entities, regulatory agencies, and other partners to work out operational challenges as well as identifying major hurdles and barriers to deployment.

Optimising the microgrid

The 14.7-acre City Yards site houses some of the City’s most critical services, including ‘back of house’ trash collection, facilities and street maintenance, fire department maintenance, and traffic operations. To ensure that these critical services remain operational even during utility company power outages (also known as “island mode”), Arup evaluated a range of options for maintaining full and part load operations at the site across a range of periods. The potential for the microgrid to also provide power to first responders during major events was also considered.  

For the base scenario, which integrates City Yards, the microgrid was optimized with 1.2MW of solar photovoltaic and 7.2MWh of electrical energy storage. With this capacity, the system is able to meet the use case for the microgrid required by the City. 

The analyses also indicated that more dynamic utility rates and incentives are required to bridge the gap between project costs and system benefits. When the system was dispatched against a real-time rate that reflected marginal costs, the microgrid provided $4.6M in net benefits over 25 years.

 

Partners & collaborators

UC Irvine / E3 / ICLEI / LA Metro