From 2021-2024, NRECA Research conducted the MicrogridUP Project with the main goal of developing a microgrid planning software tool to enable military installations and utility privatization (UP) system owners to quickly and accurately determine microgrid investment options to improve installation resilience. The project goals were to:

1. Quantify the resilience impact of a microgrid development.
2. Reduce labor requirements to perform a microgrid analysis.
3. Provide detailed cost estimates for the lifecycles of modeled microgrid solutions.

Intended for use by distribution planning engineers at UP co-ops and military energy management staff, MicrogridUP produces detailed microgrid options across a distribution system. With user-input distribution data, MicrogridUP calculates a cost-optimal set of microgrids, and provides detailed analysis of generation mix, interconnection requirements, distribution upgrades, control characteristics, and backup survivability of the systems. 

The project achieved all of its performance goals, including quantifying the resilience impact of a candidate microgrid, labor reduction calculations due to centralized process efficiencies, and the lifecycle cost estimates for a candidate microgrid, including capital costs and operations and maintenance. All three of these objectives were analyzed through statistical methodologies, graphical methodologies, and internal validity. 

The software itself and open-source code is available at: https://microgridup.org/dl.html. As an open-source software, it has no purchase cost. Documentation and planning guidance for the software is available at: https://microgridup.org/playbook.html.

The tool's benefit to the Department of War lies in the ability for military installations and UP system owners to quickly and accurately determine microgrid investment options applicable to them. This is typically an arduous and convoluted process that may or may not give clear answers even after a significant amount of time is devoted to answering it for a specific base, making this tool beneficial for achieving installation energy resilience by simplifying the process. 

Within the tool itself, due to the complexity of the underlying calculations, users should expect long processing times—from 30 minutes for simple queries to six hours or longer for more complex scenarios. If a proposed scenario is not feasible or requires too long to process, the modeling process can fail. (Project Completion - 2024)