Community Microgrids: Unveiling the Additional Cost of Reliability and the True Value of Demand Response

Residential customers are frequently exposed to electricity supply interruptions caused by system failures, natural hazards, or human-related events. Community microgrids have emerged as a promising solution to improve supply reliability. Therefore, this study quantifies the additional cost of guaranteeing different levels of energy self-sufficiency through the optimal design of reliability-constrained community microgrids capable of maintaining electricity supply during outages regardless of when they occur throughout the year. To account for the inherent diversity of residential demand, hundreds of optimization problems were solved, resulting in the design of hundreds of community microgrids. The results indicate that guaranteeing 2 h of self-sufficiency increases annual costs by 14.1% for communities of 20 households. Furthermore, the impact of demand response (DR) on community microgrid planning is also investigated. The findings indicate that the economic benefits of residential DR are limited, not exceeding 4.4% of the total microgrid cost.