Designing Solar+Storage to Power Critical Loads: An Introduction to New Resilient Power Features in NREL’s REopt Lite Tool

The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) has added important new features to its free solar+storage (and now +wind) online optimization tool, REopt Lite, that will help building owners, energy managers, and emergency planners assess a building’s technology needs to power essential services with onsite resources during grid disruptions. The tool was developed to assist users in quickly and simply evaluating the costs and benefits of implementing renewables and battery storage for electric bill savings and improved energy resilience in facilities across the U.S.

This webinar focused on REopt Lite’s new Critical Load Builder functionality. The load builder allows users to create a daily emergency load profile by building up a list of equipment that must remain powered during a grid outage. Users can select equipment from a list of standard devices or add custom critical loads by specifying wattage and operational characteristics.

The tool’s new custom rate feature was also introduced. The custom rate feature allows users to model proposed or hypothetical electric rate tariffs or enter rates not yet included in the Utility Rate Database maintained by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Energy Information Administration.

Kate Anderson, who leads the Modeling and Analysis Group at NREL, provided an overview of REopt Lite for anyone new to the tool and Andrew Jeffery, REopt Lite user interface developer, introduced the new features. This was followed by a demonstration of the Critical Load Builder by Clean Energy Group vice president and project director, Seth Mullendore.

This webinar was a presentation of Clean Energy Group’s Resilient Power Project. Learn more at www.resilient-power.org.