A microgrid is solar plus storage plus smart controls — engineered to keep your operations running when the grid goes down, and to lower your costs every other day of the year.
Most facilities are entirely dependent on the utility. A microgrid changes that. When the grid is healthy, you operate connected and lower your bills. When the grid fails, you island and keep running.
Rooftop, ground-mount, or canopy solar produces clean electricity during daylight hours — the workhorse of the system.
Stores excess solar for use at night, during outages, or when grid prices spike. Provides the instant power that lets the system island cleanly.
The brain of the system. Automatically isolates from the grid during an outage (called islanding), dispatches the battery, prioritizes critical loads, and reconnects when the utility comes back.
For multi-day resilience, a natural-gas generator, fuel cell, or other firm resource can be added — sized as a backstop, not the primary source.
Generation, storage, controls, and an optional backstop — coordinated by the controller and switchgear.
The daytime workhorse. Rooftop, ground-mount, or canopy.
Holds energy for nights, outages, and price spikes.
The brain. Islands, dispatches, prioritizes critical loads.
Natural-gas or fuel-cell backstop for multi-day resilience.
Grid outages are getting longer and more frequent. Microgrids turn that risk into operational confidence — and they save money every single day of normal operation.
When the grid fails, the microgrid takes over within milliseconds. Hospitals, fire stations, water treatment, and other critical operations stay online without interruption.
When the grid is up, the microgrid runs solar against your load, dispatches the battery to cut demand charges, and trims your utility bill. Resilience pays for itself.
Less exposure to utility rate volatility, fuel price spikes, and capacity charges. You own your generation and you control your operating cost.
A working microgrid is the most credible sustainability story you can tell. Real, on-site clean generation backed by real resilience — not paper credits.
In some markets, microgrids can sell capacity, ancillary services, or demand response back to the grid — an additional revenue stream that improves project economics.
Schools, churches, and government buildings increasingly serve as community shelters during disasters. A microgrid makes that role real.
Microgrids are more involved than a standalone solar or storage project. Typical timeline runs 12 to 18 months from feasibility to commissioning.
We model your loads, identify the critical circuits that must stay live during an outage, and design a preliminary system. Output: a clear go/no-go with budget, timeline, and projected economics.
Detailed electrical engineering — solar layout, battery sizing, switchgear specification, controls architecture, and the islanding sequence. Coordinated with your utility and your existing electrical infrastructure.
Local permits, utility interconnection agreements, and any required studies. Microgrids require more utility coordination than simple solar; we manage that process end to end.
Solar, battery system, switchgear, and controls integration. Commissioning includes islanding tests, load-rejection tests, and full operational validation before the system goes live.
Once commissioned, the microgrid runs autonomously under our 24/7 monitoring. We provide ongoing O&M, performance reporting, and software updates for the life of the system.
Microgrids make the most sense where downtime is genuinely expensive or where the facility plays a community role during emergencies.
Life-safety loads cannot tolerate interruption. Microgrids deliver cleaner, faster, more reliable backup than diesel-only systems — and lower the operating cost the rest of the year.
Many districts now formally serve as designated emergency shelters. A microgrid keeps HVAC, lighting, communications, and refrigeration running for days.
Public safety operations need power during the events that knock the grid down. Microgrids decouple critical response from utility status.
Continuous, conditioned power is the product. Solar plus storage plus controls is replacing aging UPS-and-diesel architecture with cleaner, more efficient systems.
Treatment plants must keep running through extended outages. Microgrids ensure public health doesn’t depend on fuel deliveries during a regional emergency.
For operations where production downtime exceeds five-figure-per-hour, microgrid economics work fast. The resilience is the headline; the daily energy savings are the bonus.
A backup generator only runs during outages and burns fuel the whole time. A microgrid runs every day — lowering your bill, providing resilience, and reducing emissions — and only falls back to backup generation when solar and storage can’t carry the load. Same resilience, much better economics, dramatically lower emissions.
Indefinitely, as long as solar production keeps recharging the battery and loads stay manageable. For multi-day events with heavy cloud cover, the practical duration depends on battery sizing and whether a backup generator is included. Most designs target several days of full critical-load operation.
Microgrid pricing scales with the size of the critical load and the level of resilience required. Order of magnitude — $2–$5M for a meaningful school or municipal microgrid; $10M+ for a hospital-scale system. Under an energy-as-a-service or PPA structure, the host can pay zero capex and buy capacity-as-a-service instead.
Yes — microgrids qualify for the federal Investment Tax Credit, accelerated depreciation, and (for nonprofits) direct pay. PPA, lease, and energy-as-a-service structures are all available, often making it possible to deploy a full microgrid with no upfront capital.
No. Microgrids operate connected to the grid by default and only island during outages. Once the grid is restored, the microgrid automatically resyncs and reconnects. The utility relationship continues; the dependence on it does not.
Often, yes — though it depends on the age and configuration of the existing solar. Older grid-tied solar systems aren’t designed to operate during outages and typically need inverter upgrades and additional switchgear to participate in a microgrid. We assess feasibility on a case-by-case basis.
If your operations can’t afford to go dark, let’s have a conversation about what a microgrid would look like at your facility.
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