Islands have unique energy challenges

Islands face extreme challenges from an energy security perspective. Pipelines supplying inexpensive and plentiful natural gas are not an option for them. Only very large islands, such as Taiwan, can use coal or nuclear. These factors have left most of them completely dependent on liquid fuels derived from petroleum, mostly diesel.  With only a few weeks of on-island storage, a supply interruption that delays the oil supply barge becomes an economic and security nightmare. The biggest security nightmare is a rising sea level due to climate change.

Read more about the challenges and opportunities of island energy here.

Although it’s a big stretch to say that power microgrids are “about” to become mainstream, two recent articles by thought leaders in the energy world illustrate that it won't take much of a change in thinking and behavior to catapult microgrids into the grid-based world.

What You Need to Know About Blackouts - by Amory Lovins, Chief Scientist of the Rocky Mountain Institute, in Time Ideas

A Power Company President Ties His Future to Green Energy - an interview with David Crane, CEO of NRG Energy, in Yale Environment 360

Microgrid News Coverage of the Two Stories

Have you ever wondered what this button does?

It is your door to one of HOMER's most powerful features – the automated sensitivity analysis. HOMER's automated sensitivity analyses allow you to easily see the impact of different assumptions about almost any HOMER input. Some inputs are highly uncertain, such as future fuel prices or average wind speed (if you haven't done a site-specific assessment). It is valuable to know which uncertain inputs are important enough to warrant more attention and which ones don't matter. (Hint, the solar resource doesn't matter nearly as much as common sense would suggest.)

It is also useful to know what would make an optimal system no longer optimal or vice versa. This is especially true in such a rapidly changing field as renewables and distributed power. If you fill in more than one value in the Sensitivity Values window (accessed by the button shown at the top of this article), HOMER will perform a separate optimization for each value. The button will list how many values you entered. If you added multiple values to more than one input, you can access them all at one time with the toolbar at the top. You can also create informative graphs such as the "Optimal System Type" graph, the most widely shown HOMER output:

Do you have a tip for HOMER users? If so, please share it with us in the HOMER users community here.