Microgrid Technologies for Remote Indonesian Islands

project summary

Tech-IN is aimed at overcoming the challenges associated with the large-scale deployment of renewable-based microgrids (MGs) in the hazardous environment of the Indonesian Islands that is prone to severe natural disasters (NDs). Tech-IN’s goal is twofold: it will cope with two main concerns in Indonesia: (i) to increase the renewable energy while reducing the fossil fuel dependence, and (ii) bringing electricity to remote places and Islands. Secondly, it will provide high levels of resiliency and availability of electricity supply in front of natural disasters. Indonesia is suffering 3,622 NDs including tornadoes, floods, and landslides occurred across the country in 2019. Each time a disaster strikes, it not just only causes an interruption in electricity supply, it also compromises telecommunication, transportation, and health sector infrastructures interconnected with the electricity network. Therefore, a resilient electrification system capable to deal with NDs is highly demanded in the Indonesian context and renewables-based scalable MGs can be the key solution in this regard. Tech-IN will develop new MG architectures with high levels of resiliency and scalability. Three layers of granularity will be developed. The potential of MGs deployment will be investigated for grid-connected and islanded applications by considering two case studies: Lombok and Medang Islands. Moreover, based on the techno-socio-economic analysis of the Indonesian energy sector, control architectures, and reconfigurable energy management systems will be developed for all three levels of granularity.