Located on Cape Cod, the Yarmouth microgrid will power an emergency operations center in the hurricane-hardened Fire Station 3 during extreme weather events. The microgrid is also required to supply at least 10 days of off-grid power during outages and reduce greenhouse gas emissions by delivering 50% of the fire station’s year-round energy needs with renewable energy. The project team completed the initial plan with funding from the Massachusetts Municipal Vulnerability Preparedness (MVP) grant program.
Due to climate change, Massachusetts weather is getting more challenging for municipalities. With extreme weather events hitting the state’s coastline more frequently, cities increasingly need to provide shelter and safety for residents, ride out extended power outages and finance costly repairs to damaged infrastructure. The Massachusetts state government reported 23 major weather disasters between 1990 and 2019, almost triple the amount declared in the previous three decades. The uptick in costly storms comes in the form of intense snowfalls that cause multiday power outages and heavy downpours that trigger regional flooding and tornadoes — one of which caused widespread damage on Cape Cod in 2019.
In response to the prospect of more extreme weather in the future, Massachusetts established its MVP grant program to provide support for cities and towns to assess the risk to populations and physical assets from climate change. Based on its proximity to the Atlantic Ocean, where the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has documented rising sea levels and temperatures, Yarmouth is particularly vulnerable to severe, unpredictable weather. The town also has a large population of seniors, with 30% over 65 years old, and four communities where median household incomes are low enough to qualify as “Environmental Justice neighborhoods.”
Because Yarmouth met both demographic and vulnerability criteria, Massachusetts chose the town for an MVP grant to fund planning for resilience upgrades to two mission-critical facilities, one of the fire stations and a regional septic waste and trash processing center. While the waste plant project is more complex and still in process, the project team has completed the plans for resilience upgrades at Fire Station 3.
Multiple stakeholders crafted and approved the Yarmouth project
Rivermoor Energy, a company that plans, develops and finances hybrid energy solutions, teamed up with engineering partner Weston & Sampson to develop a resilience project and craft strategies to help finance it. “We set this up so it would be an investment quality undertaking that can be financed by a third party,” said veteran solar developer and Rivermoor Energy founder John Tourtelotte.
Tourtelotte explained that Rivermoor helped create a predecessor to the Massachusetts MVP program that promoted community clean energy and resiliency. MVP achieves those goals by providing a combination of clean energy incentives and requirements for municipalities to create a “municipal vulnerability plan” that addresses climate change impacts, including coastal storms, flooding and power outages.
“It’s important to have both incentives and mandates for climate action,” Tourtelotte said, adding that it’s especially critical with complex projects like Yarmouth’s. Weston & Sampson is partnering with Rivermoor to provide planning for stormwater management and other non-energy aspects of the Yarmouth climate resilience project. Weston & Sampson consults with towns on strategic planning, integrating design, engineering and environmental services. Rivermoor Energy and Weston & Sampson are state-certified providers under the MVP program.
Together, they developed a plan that would provide resilience, cost-cutting and sustainability, as well as produce a revenue stream to attract financial investors. Tourtelotte said collaboration with multiple towns that make up the “Cape Light Compact” will accomplish part of the energy savings. Cape Cod communities are working together to reduce peak demand and cut energy costs in that arrangement. One of the initiatives is the demand response program, “Connected Solutions,” where utilities pay rewards to use battery storage and reduce peak demand during summer peak periods and to a lesser extent during winter peaks.
After the initial resilience plan was complete, the Yarmouth Board of Selectmen approved the MVP grant. According to then-Yarmouth town manager Dan Knapik, stakeholders supportively discussed renewable energy and energy storage in many previous town meetings.
The new microgrid will provide Yarmouth with an emergency operations center
When completed, the upgraded Fire Station 3 microgrid will feature a 264-kilowatt (kW) photovoltaic array configured as a solar canopy over the parking lot and a 180-kWh battery storage system. The existing 150-kW generator will serve as backup. The project will also include a new energy management system with microgrid controls. Overall, the resilience makeover will reduce greenhouse gas emissions of firehouse operations by nearly 95%, according to UL’s HOMER engineering team that helped model the system.
Working with Tourtelotte, the UL team created separate HOMER models for the fire station and the regional septic waste center. These models were used to size the assets and optimize how they work together, simulating their performance at different times of the year. The models also helped demonstrate that the facility could participate in the utility demand-response program, island and operate off the grid for 10 days, and provide revenue for investors. “We used HOMER Grid to design a feasible solution,” noted Tourtelotte.
According to UL Renewables’ HOMER Grid Lead Eduardo Guerra, “Our engineers are here to help in any capacity that’s needed,” whether that is to build out an entire model or check the accuracy of models that customers have built. “These types of models are relatively new,” said Guerra. “The HOMER Grid software is powerful enough to calculate a wide variety of incentives and help project developers predict performance and costs. That includes utilities that are under increasing pressure to develop clean energy projects.”
Yarmouth project demonstrates resilience planning for other towns
In addition to improving its resiliency to extreme weather events, the town of Yarmouth also wanted to create an “industry-leading, regional clean energy strategy which other Cape Cod communities can use as a model of implementation,” according to Dan Kapnik.
He said the new resilience strategy has been shared with over 20 towns across Cape Cod. Several of Yarmouth’s neighbors will be able to share in the financing and benefits of the new emergency operations center. “You need partners to help,” he added. “It helps to bring in other towns with you.”
Knapik, who has managed five Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) extreme weather disasters, knows the value of resiliency from experiencing multiple mishaps, such as diesel shortages and roads blocked by fallen trees. “You would only know about these things if you had lived through them,” he said. “If we do this right in Yarmouth, this can be a blueprint for other towns. This project is small scale, and it’s a scale any town can manage. It makes the public case that a microgrid can function and deliver a range of benefits.”
UL Solutions HOMER Grid is a market-leading solar-plus-storage software tool for designing grid-tied distributed energy systems. With an integrated utility tariff database and a new module for electric vehicle charging stations, it optimizes peak shaving to help commercial and industrial utility customers lower their demand charges. HOMER Grid can model projects with wind and combined heat and power as well as islanded systems, helping users improve their resiliency. Explore your opportunities with HOMER Grid during a complimentary trial. Learn more and download your complimentary trial.
Is it built yet or still in the planning stages?
Hi Stephen,
Thank you for your comment. This project is in the planning stages.
All the best,
Lili Francklyn