Arlington Microgrid V2G Demo Project Deployment, Integration Insights

The Arlington Microgrid (MG) was approved for co-funding by the WA State Clean Energy Fund in May 2017. In February 2022, the Arlington MG was successfully commissioned and then accepted by Snohomish PUD (SnoPUD). While Covid impacted the timeline from funding-approval to acceptance, there were abundant technical challenges in the design thru deployment that added to this timeline. A major overall challenge that consumed significant engineering time and effort was integration across the various assets and the overall MG monitoring and control systems. This was particularly true for the Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G) portion of the Arlington MG’s overall scope. This would be expected given the very early stage of industry experience with V2G technology, vs the BESS and PV resources also connected to the MG. The Arlington demonstration is a great platform to evaluate what went right, and what needs further improvement to lower integration-related barriers to V2G’s broader industry adoption and use. The webinar will start with a recap by SnoPUD of their Arlington Microgrid project, and specific integration challenges overcome to allow the V2G to participate as an active MG resource. This will be followed by a recap of an analysis performed by PNNL that 1) evaluated the Arlington V2G specification against newer and pending Standards that weren’t present to support initial project design and 2) identification of the standards that will have to be coordinated across two industries for V2G to flourish, i.e. the IEEE and SAE. The webinar will conclude with discussion on next steps from an industry perspective, e.g. what standards need further development to provide a prudent but receptive technical environment for V2G to evolve.