Center Launches New Jersey Community Microgrids Planning Academy

                                                 Photo of New Jersey Community Microgrids Planning Academy home page

The Center for Resilient Design has launched the Community Microgrids Planning Academy—a multi-media online educational platform designed to instruct jurisdictions on how to collect, organize, and analyze infrastructure data for the purpose of creating effective microgrid development plans for their communities in order to proceed to the next stage in the overall microgrid development process: the technical feasibility assessment.

This Academy is the culmination of the Microgrids for Resilient Communities Planning Project (SPRAG-185828) undertaken by a multi-discplinary team led by the Center and including Greener by Design, LLC and the Regional Plan Association. The team assisted three jurisdictions in New Jersey—Galloway, Neptune, and Newark—in collecting information for and creating microgrid development plans robust enough to support a technical feasibility assessment.

The Academy incorporates the lessons learned from the microgrid development planning processes observed and documented in these three municipalities, supplemented by best practice information from regional and national sources.

Organized into 5 key sections – Microgrid Basics; the Microgrid Development Process; Community Microgrid Planning; Expert Tutorials; and Resources – the Academy is designed to:

  • Explain what community microgrids are;
  • Describe their potential economic and resilience benefits;
  • Delineate the series of steps needed to develop, implement and manage a microgrid;
  • and prepare municipal officials to more effectively engage with the growing level of microgrid development activity across the US.