Network of Microgrids: Opportunities and Challenges

Microgrids are a promising technology to achieve the sustainability goals set by the UN to fight against climate change, create affordable and clean energy, sustainable cities and communities, and economic growth by creating a reliable, resilient, green power infrastructure. There are limitations to the benefits that microgrids can provide. To overcome the limitations and bolster the benefits of individual microgrids, they can be interconnected, creating a network of microgrids (NoMs). NoMs have many benefits that individual microgrids cannot accomplish, such as participating in power interchange between connected microgrids and the utility grid. This will increase reliability and resiliency and create economic benefits for the participants of NoMs. Challenges exist in NoMs, including data analysis, communication, and cyber-security to operations and management of the NoMs. This paper will go over the benefits that NoMs can provide and the challenges currently being researched in academia.