Lugo Alvarez, Melvin

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Improving energy resource availability and resilience with the strategic placement of microgrids
(2019-12-09) Lugo Alvarez, Melvin; Ortiz-Rivera, Eduardo I.; College of Engineering; Cedeño Maldonado, Jose R.; Orama Exclusa, Lionel R.; Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering; Colon Ramirez, Silvestre
Natural disasters are increasingly impacting the power availability to communities around the world causing long term blackouts. Rural and remote communities are at a greater risk of suffering longer blackouts due to being lower priority or more difficult to power during the energy restoration efforts. Utilities may not have a complete picture of the restoration of power across time, this is where previous work done by NASA comes in by providing a time series of the recovery process using nighttime satellite imagery. This work proposes a methodology regarding microgrid planning and critical asset clustering using GIS, census, and the nighttime imagery provided by NASA. The work presents a workflow as well as the decision criteria involved. The aftermath of Hurricane María in Puerto Rico is presented as the test case, with a more detailed example based in the town of Jayuya.