Environmental Engineering Reference
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to demonstrate their enhanced resilience. Princeton University's microgrid, for example,
ensured that essential electricity services were restored almost immediately, while most of
the region remained without power.
Thesesmall-scale initiatives alsopromiseeconomicbenefits,includingenhancedenergy
security and a stronger local economy. Potential benefits range from cutting municipal
costs by installing more efficient street lighting, to the promise of creating new jobs for
local residents, to building a smart and resilient grid.
Small-scale community-based initiatives may be somewhat limited in their contribution
to environmental health because of scale issues and the fact that many incorporate fossil
generation like diesel generators or natural gas-fired microturbines. Still, proponents of
small-scale electricity often argue that, by choosing to increase the proportion of electricity
generated by renewable resources and by decarbonizing the electricity production for a
single community, they have improved environmental quality by contributing to climate
change mitigation, as well as reducing local emissions of air and water pollutants. Again,
this depends on what sources of power generation are included in the microgrids and how
they are operated.
One of the most significant promises of community-based small-scale local initiatives
is the enhancement of citizen engagement. Advocates of community-based electricity note
that decisions are made at the local level by the people whose lives are most directly
impacted by those decisions. Community-based smart grid initiatives could offer
high-quality public participation opportunities, and enable people to develop new
connections with their energy system. Community power projects have the potential to
empower electricity users by enabling them to become self-reliant prosumers; people who
directlyinfluencethesystem,ratherthanpassiveconsumers.Forsomemunicipalities,local
control could also bring independence, and with that comes power and freedom from the
big utilities or from the larger systems.
Not everyone is persuaded that microgrids and community-based electricity systems are
apositive development forsociety.Someactors pointoutthedangersposedifcommunities
are allowed to go their own way and gain independence through locally controlled
electricity systems. Incorporating more community-based electricity into the system could
harm the larger system's existing reliability through loss of redundancy or underinvestment
in communal transmission networks. Power quality is one of the most often cited issues of
small-scale grid initiatives. Because distributed renewable resources are highly dependent
on environmental factors, their variability has introduced some power quality problems
into the system (Mariam
2013a
).
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