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Quantification of Technical, Economic, Environmental and Social Benefits of Microgrid Operation
7.1 Introduction and Overview of Potential Microgrid Benefits
Depending on its operation strategy (see Figure 1.5), a microgrid can provide a large variety of economic, technical, environmental, and social benefits to both internal and external stakeholders. This chapter analyzes such benefits in detail, based on typical networks identified for a number of representative EU member states. The study has been completed in the framework of the EU R&D project, More Microgrids [1].
Figure 7.1 provides an overview of microgrid benefits in economic, technical and environmental aspects. Each benefit item is mapped to the related stakeholder with dotted lines. Obviously, identification of microgrid benefits is a multi-objective and multi-stakeholder interest coordination task.
Figure 7.1 Overview of microgrid benefits
Before going into details of a quantitative analysis, a brief qualitative overview of these benefits is given.
7.1.1 Overview of Economic Benefits of a Microgrid
The economic values created by a microgrid can be roughly categorized into providing locality benefit and selectivity benefit. Locality benefit is mainly attributed to the creation of an internal “over-the-grid” energy market within the microgrid, where microsource units could sell at ...
