Small Reactors in Microgrids: A Financial, Resilience and Environmental Case

This paper presents a financial, resilience, and environmental case for including small reactors (SRs) in the suite of candidate electricity and heat generation for microgrids. Microgrids are accepted as a strong provider of resilience to sustaining life and mission-critical services. However, in today’s form, they are based on carbon-intensive energy sources. The analysis of this paper develops a new technoeconomic model for SRs that approximately translates their financial and operational characteristics to a gas generator modeled in a microgrid optimization software. The SR model captures the major technoeconomic characteristics of SRs and effectively utilizes them for microgrid planning studies. A feasibility study is conducted for a microgrid proposed for a military base in California. Multiple optimization scenarios are developed based on the resilience requirement, cost reduction, potential taxation on CO2 emission, and lower investment costs by sizing the plant at scale (economies of scale). The results from the scenarios and subsequent comparative analysis show that SRs would be a cost-competitive generation option when the CO2 tax is imposed on carbon fuels. Furthermore, if capital costs are modeled considering the potential of cost reduction from sizing the plant at scale, SRs would be even more attractive than gas generators.