Case Studies
Innovative Housing Microgrid for Community Resilience at Marcus Garvey Village
The first-of-its-kind low- and middle-income housing microgrid project at Marcus Garvey Village in Brooklyn reduces local electricity demand on the power grid and provides the community with power resources after a power loss event, facilitating both community and grid resilience.
Marcus Garvey Village is a multifamily affordable housing complex that covers approximately nine city blocks of Brooklyn’s Brownsville neighborhood, including 625 apartments across 32 buildings.1,2 Con Edison considered building a new substation to meet increasing energy demand at the existing Brownsville substation. However, lessons learned from Superstorm Sandy about the energy system’s vulnerabilities and the substantial cost of a new substation led Con Edison to take a different approach. This case study describes the creation of a resilient microgrid system at the Marcus Garvey Village complex and explores its associated benefits.
Highlights
- Community housing projects in New York City have successfully deployed microgrid adaptation measures for extreme weather events and high electricity bills.
- The Marcus Garvey Village microgrid project reduces demand on an overstressed electric grid and provides climate resilience for the community.
The Brooklyn-Queens Demand Management Initiative asked surrounding customers to propose ways to cut energy grid demand. To address this concern, the developer responsible for upgrading the Marcus Garvey Village complex partnered with energy companies to propose a first-of-its kind multifamily residential microgrid in New York City. Microgrids are smaller power systems with energy generation units that are connected to users in close proximity. These smaller systems with nearby customers can operate independently from the larger grid or supplement the existing energy supply from the grid. Microgrids help to reduce demand on the larger grid during times of peak performance, such as extreme heat events. In addition, microgrids can provide continuous power to users even when the larger grid experiences outages due to extreme weather events.3
The Marcus Garvey Village microgrid system comprises a 400-kilowatt rooftop solar photovoltaic (PV), a 400-kilowatt natural gas fuel cell, and a 300-kilowatt/1200-kilowatt-hour lithium-ion battery for energy storage.1,2 This microgrid can generate about 1.1 megawatts of electricity to help meet the demand from Marcus Garvey Village’s 625 residential units (approximately 1.5 megawatts peak in the summer and 3 megawatts peak in the winter); the larger grid provides additional electricity to meet demand above the microgrid’s supply.1 The microgrid increases the housing complex’s climate resilience. The storage capacity of the microgrid system ensures that the residents of Marcus Garvey Village have reliable energy resources during power outages caused by storms or during times of high electricity demand. In an emergency, residents could gather in a communal space that would receive emergency power for heating, lighting, cell phone charging, and refrigeration for medicines for up to 12 hours.2 The New York State Energy Research and Development Authority monitors the performance of this project and other distributed energy resources, and provides a dashboard for the Marcus Garvey microgrid system performance data. The New York City Energy Efficiency Corporation financed the $1.3 million lithium-ion battery as a pilot and has created a more detailed summary of the project’s financing.
In addition to improving climate resilience, the microgrid lowered utility costs for the complex. Residents pay these utility costs as part of their rent. Operation of the microgrid system lowered the monthly power bill for Marcus Garvey Village by 15% to 20%. Building owners have used the cost savings to invest in programming for residents.
The Marcus Garvey community microgrid project can serve as an example for other communities, showing that microgrids can be attainably financed, installed, and operated. As lessons are learned from the project and the technology improves, microgrids can become more efficient and leverage cleaner technologies to facilitate the just energy transition.
References
1. Anzilotti, E. (2018, July 25). These apartments’ microgrid is a lesson in urban resilience. Fast Company. https://www.fastcompany.com/90202972/this-apartment-complexs-microgrid-is-a-lesson-in-urban-resilience
2. Wright, K., & Hanley, W. (2017). Resilient solar case study: The Marcus Garvey Apartments microgrid. City University of New York Smart Distributed Generation Hub. https://nysolarmap.com/media/1844/marcus-garvey_casestudy_917.pdf
3. Center for Climate and Energy Solutions. (n.d.). Microgrids. Retrieved January 17, 2024, from https://www.c2es.org/content/microgrids/