EPRI’s Jackie Baum says microgrids have to do more than sit idle for emergencies. “The majority of the time, the power is on,” she said, urging utilities to use those resources.

Baum described DERs as resources typically operating below 69 kV, including behind‑the‑meter solar and storage, as well as utility‑owned or operator‑owned generation sited locally.

She cited the U.S. Department of Energy’s technical term for a microgrid, which has “clearly defined electrical boundaries” and acts as a single controllable entity, either connected to or islanded from the larger grid — a distinction that becomes increasingly important as microgrids expand into larger, more complex applications.

The challenge, Baum said, is making microgrids predictable enough for utilities to rely on, including when resources will be available and how they will affect the broader system.

Jon Hawkins, associate director of grid modernization at Public Service Co. of New Mexico, or PNM, described how the utility is trying to fit microgrids into a framework built around uniformity.

“If you’ve seen one microgrid, you’ve seen one microgrid,” Hawkins said, noting that every project comes with a different mix of loads, generation and controls and that, unlike solar or storage, “we don’t have those same standardizations in the microgrid world yet, so while [PNM] supports it, it’s also a longer, more involved process as we get people to try to interconnect to the grid.”

To move from pilots to product-like systems, Sandia National Laboratories is building four scenario-based grid engineering facilities to test power electronics, controls, storage and inverters before they are deployed in the field.

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