June 2025
Sustainability and the Energy Transition
Managing the energy transition: Microgrids play a key role
This article dives into the use of microgrids, and how they can help power certain plants within refineries and petrochemical facilities.
Unplanned shutdowns are always challenging for large industrial facilities, but the power outage in February 2024 at bp’s Whiting refinery in Indiana (U.S.) proved particularly problematic.1
The outage—later traced to the failure of a single transformer—forced the refinery (one of the largest in the U.S.) to shutdown for more than six weeks, causing production losses and a carbon dioxide (CO2) release into the atmosphere. Beyond those immediate effects, the shutdown caused local gas prices to increase by as much as $0.20/gallon and national prices to jump by an average of more than $0.12/gallon.
While this incident highlights the deeply interconnected nature of industrial systems and the energy value chain (and how vulnerable those systems are to unexpected disruptions), it also serves as a near-perfect example of why a growing number of companies across energy-intensive industries are turning to an increasingly relevant and popular technology: microgrids.
Delivering flexibility and reliability. For decades, asset-intensive companies and other large facilities—such as hospitals, airports and data centers—have relied on costly backup generators to provide emergency power during outages or other disruptions to the grid, and have supplemented grid power with captive power generation.
While such supplemental power supply systems have, in the past, been effective for keeping critical units and systems operating, they are ultimately limited. They were typically installed with simple control, monitoring and supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems and predate today’s grid and power market complexities. While these arrangements do a reasonable job of ensuring power availability to critical units and can supplement the grid during periods of peak power demand, these legacy systems are unable to incorporate renewable power generation, cannot predict supply and demand enough for electricity market participation, and fall short as power grid interruption events become more frequent. Microgrids, by comparison, offer far greater flexibility and reliability.
Essentially, a microgrid is a self-contained electricity system designed to serve a single plant site or infrastructure location (e.g., oil refineries, chemical or metals refining plants, data centers, airports). It allows companies to own and manage their onsite generation and management system to predict and respond to power supply and load fluctuations, and to disconnect (island) from the grid when necessary.
When implemented with advanced digital grid management tools, microgrids afford companies far more control over how power is produced, distributed and consumed across their assets, allowing them to optimize day-to-day operations. This greater management capability also enables companies to incorporate renewable resources—such as solar and wind power—and battery storage into their operations, helping them optimize asset power consumption and cost as they balance margins and production against their carbon footprint.
Microgrid management tools are invaluable in predicting the availability of intermittent renewable generation resources, allowing operators to proactively plan for situations where power supply may fall short, supply peaks or sell excess power back into the grid.
Microgrids—because of their self-contained nature—can be “unplugged” from the larger grid if or when disruptions occur. This ability is particularly important, as there is evidence that such disruptions are becoming more common.
In the U.S. alone, there were at least three major refinery shutdowns in the first seven months of 2024 caused by power outages. In two of the three cases, more than two weeks were needed before production was back to normal levels.
While the causes for those outages include everything from a damaged transformer to impacts from severe storms, recent studies by Bloom Energy suggest that more than three-quarters of commercial and industrial power customers experience one to two outages per year, making their ability to manage such disruptions a key consideration.
With micro and digital grid management tools, operators have far greater insight into how power is used across their operations. With improved situational awareness, they can act quickly during a disruption to unplug from the larger grid and make specific decisions to keep critical systems up and running to enable more orderly shutdowns. The result is not only safer and more efficient shutdown, but reduces risk to assets and workers, and minimizes downtime.
As the grid ages and becomes more stressed in certain regions, some utilities and governments are pursuing active strategies to promote microgrids. Utilities in these regions are working as fast as they can—within the constraints of planning and regulatory processes—to increase generation, transmission and distribution capacities. In some areas, the projected future electricity demand is outpacing the speed at which utilities can respond. In those areas, microgrids can serve as a power reliability strategy for heavy electricity consumers and as a grid safety net for the regional utility, where a network of privately owned microgrids connected to the grid can add to the overall grid resiliency. In regions as separated as upstate New York, California and Western Australia, such strategies are underway.
Support a changing business model. The energy transition is a challenge that will continue to drive the need for significant global investments in the grid over the next 15 yr. As new forms of energy are incorporated (e.g., wind, solar, geothermal, hydrogen), power grids are more complex than ever before. Industrial energy users are becoming “prosumers” who produce and consume energy and may sell some power back to the grid. Business boundaries are becoming blurred, and for industrial and energy-intensive companies, opportunities are coming amidst complexities. However, the risks that come from disruptions to that system are also becoming more significant.
For companies whose business continuity depends on the reliability of electricity supply, microgrids are quickly becoming an essential tool that offers asset-intensive companies power reliability and the opportunity to better optimize their operations. This will help them reach higher levels of operational excellence while increasing sustainability.
LITERATURE CITED
1 Reuters, “Power loss forces BP to shut biggest US Midwest refinery,” February 2024, online: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/power-loss-forces-bp-shut-biggest-us-midwest-refinery-2024-02-02/#:~:text=HOUSTON,%20Feb%201%20(Reuters)%20-%20BP%20(BP.L)%20was%20purging%20its?src=email-global-nonrespnd&utm_campaign=20250128-sust-rw-microgrids_for_energy-wbn-nrp-em1&utm_medium=email&utm_source=eloqua
The Authors
RON BECK is the senior director of solutions marketing at Emerson’s Aspen Technology business, based in Boston, Massachusetts. He has 40 yr of experience working at the intersection of energy, electricity, sustainability and digitalization, and 17 yr of experience in various roles at AspenTech. Beck has authored many articles, white papers and other content, most of which can be accessed through his LinkedIn page.
T.J. SURBELLA is a strategic planning director at Emerson’s Aspen Technology business with more than 12 yr of experience leading microgrid projects. He recently helped launch the AspenTech Microgrid Management System to enable customers to better manage the complexity of their electric grid. A former U.S. Navy submarine officer, Surbella is a certified nuclear engineering officer with an MS degree in engineering management and a BS degree in business administration.
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