Mission Critical Microgrids: The Case of the Alcântara Space Center

This article reports the conception and design of a mission critical microgrid to serve a critical infrastructure application, namely, the Alcântara Space Launch Center, a government military facility in Brazil. The assumptions, general characteristics, requirements and particularities arising from the application are established and discussed in detail. High resilience and energy security are required in critical periods of operation, demanding a power supply infrastructure composed of redundant and dispachable sources capable of supporting n−1 generation contingencies. Whereas, in the remaining time, economic and environmental aspects take place as main requests. Operation scenarios, on both grid-connected (on-grid) and isolated (off-grid) modes, are formulated as optimization problems and simulations have been performed to analyze these scenarios, which are reported and analyzed here. The off-grid operation, which is clearly more complex, is preferentially addressed, especially in scenarios with contingencies. In this context, the proposed microgrid is conceived to satisfactorily balance requirements such as the economy, pollutant emission reduction, high reliability, resilience and operational security, which are requested by this critical infrastructure application.