The neighbors of Crispus Attucks Park in Washington D.C. have a dream. It is not, at first blush, an especially ambitious one. They want to wire the block-long park with electricity so they could run a lawnmower, maybe bring out a band on a hot summer night, or install a few power outlets so residents could recharge an iPad while they hang out.
A few years ago, residents tried to get Pepco, the utility in D.C., to install an electrical connection. (For historical reasons, the park is privately owned by its neighbors, not by the city.) But Pepco would have charged $25,000 just to plan such a thing -- after putting the park on an 18-month waiting list -- and then would have required a private installer to do the hookup for as much as $30,000, according to Molly Scott, a resident of the Bloomingdale neighborhood who serves as the park's operations manager.
That was when the Crispus Attucks Development Corporation, the nonprofit that runs the park, got the idea that they could build a microgrid. A microgrid is a sort of mini-utility that relies on several local sources of power, like solar panels, to supply local electrical needs. It can exist independent of the power grid or interact with it so users can draw power from the macrogrid or the microgrid.
Microgrids are rising on the national radar these days in the wake of Superstorm Sandy and the frequent power outages brought on by our crazy weather. As more and more people install rooftop solar panels, they wonder: Could I rely on those panels to keep my lights on when the grid goes dark?
In most cases they can't. First problem: Most people have no way to store that electricity onsite, so if the grid goes dead, the solar panels do too. A second, and less immediate, problem: As more neighborhoods bring renewable power on board, they will eventually face a ceiling. Most utilities maintain that they will be unable to deal with local, renewable energy that provides more than 15 percent of the power supply because any more would destabilize the grid, according to Shalom Flank, the chief technology officer of Pareto Energy, a Washington, D.C. startup trying to build microgrids in the U.S. A city with robust microgrids could break this 15 percent barrier by giving neighborhoods and utilities the flexibility to supply, store, and use local power in several ways.
But Crispus Attucks Park is a long way from having such concerns. Its needs are so simple that these larger problems barely matter. All the park managers want to do is create a microgrid with a few solar panels and a battery pack to meet a few humble power needs with no connection to the larger grid.
Not so fast.
The problem is that no one at Crispus Attucks knows how to go about creating a microgrid. And they have no one to turn to for advice because, as it turns out, building even a simple microgrid is a highly complicated endeavor. Hugh Youngblood, who lives a few blocks away and is the project's volunteer consultant, has estimated it would cost $85,000 just to hire a company to do a detailed design for a microgrid, and that is before a single panel has been bought or a cable laid.
"That's a lot," said Scott, the operations manager. She added that the annual budget of the park, paying for things like the water bill and insurance, is about $10,000, drawn mostly from resident donations.
Microgrids do exist in the world today. However, most of them are either extraordinarily small -- tiny systems running a couple of lights for a few hours in a few dozen homes in rural areas of Africa or India where the electrical grid doesn't go -- or extremely large and complex, like the microgrids that help big institutions like the University of California at San Diego or Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada integrate megawatts of solar power to serve a population the size of a small city. Crispus Attucks Park, like most neighborhoods, falls in the extremely broad middle between these two extremes.
Microgrids are a growing topic of conversation. But the experience of Crispus Attucks Park shows that they are far, far away from becoming reality. Youngblood says that he knows of literally no microgrids anywhere to model his efforts on. "I'm looking for people who want to do the same sort of thing," he said.
In the meantime, the neighbors of Crispus Attucks Park, like the rest of us, wait for the solution that will deliver reliable, clean, renewable power at those times when the utility fails.
