Department: Electrical & Computer Engineering
Advisor: June Lukuyu
Under the CEI Fellowship, I will be working on understanding how the resilience benefits that a solar and battery storage system installed for a community might change as climate change makes extreme weather more common and severe and outages become more frequent and impactful. These solar and storage systems, called microgrids, support local energy resilience by providing a clean source of back-up power in case of an outage. However, there is a lack of research investigating how microgrids might be able to serve a community long-term and under uncertain conditions due to climate change. If the resilience needs of the community increase or change throughout the seasons due to extreme weather, will a microgrid designed without climate change in mind still be able to provide benefit to the community? My work investigates under what scenarios microgrid designs fail, what implications this might have for the community they serve, and what strategies can improve their long-term sustainability. This supports CEI’s mission by ensuring that communities receive an energy solution that will provide them with a sustainable clean energy system that will meet their needs long-term.