A new lens on the loads water cannot afford to lose
MicrogridModeler.com is now live, bringing hourly microgrid sizing, dispatch, lifecycle economics, and resilience analysis into a browser. For water-sector readers, its value begins with a familiar operational truth: pumps, controls, treatment trains, intake systems, and distribution equipment only deliver water while dependable electricity reaches them.
The platform evaluates off-grid and grid-connected combinations of solar PV, wind, battery storage, diesel-generator fleets, and utility service. A team can begin with a reference project or bring an 8,760-hour electrical load profile, test supported reliability and renewable-energy constraints, and compare the resulting cost and operating behavior. No software installation or account is required for the public modeler.
That makes MicrogridModeler especially interesting at the pre-feasibility stage, when a utility, engineer, community, or project developer needs to turn a resilience goal into a transparent set of electrical scenarios before committing to detailed design.
What a water team can put on the screen
A water facility is not a generic building load. Pumping can create sharp peaks; desalination can run for long blocks; storage tanks may create scheduling room; remote sites may depend on fuel deliveries; and an outage can become a public-health emergency. MicrogridModeler does not infer those realities. The project team represents them in the electric load data and the scenarios it chooses to compare.
A useful first pass could test questions such as these:
- Can a remote well, booster station, or treatment site meet every modeled hourly electrical load with a smaller diesel fleet when PV and batteries are added?
- How do lifecycle cost, renewable fraction, fuel use, and excess generation change when a desalination plant shifts production into a different operating window?
- How much stored energy is needed to carry critical pumps and controls through a defined grid outage?
- Does a candidate remain feasible when component failures and repair times are introduced?
- Which result changes when measured load and resource data replace a synthetic or default profile?
The unusually useful feature is the audit trail
Microgrid decisions often travel farther than the person who built the first spreadsheet. Operators, finance teams, engineers, board members, grant reviewers, and regulators may all need to understand what a result assumed. MicrogridModeler is designed around that handoff.
The platform says each run can export its inputs, provenance, outputs, hourly results, engine version, constraint status, and a content fingerprint. Its local sizing route makes a deliberately bounded claim: the lowest-net-present-cost feasible design among the candidates the declared search actually evaluated. The current workspace also exposes a separate REopt V3 sizing option, making it important to record which engine and search produced a recommendation.
For a rural water district or island system with limited staff, that transparency can be as valuable as a polished chart. It creates a record another reviewer can inspect, rerun, and challenge when fuel price, load growth, equipment cost, or resilience requirements change.
Where MicrogridModeler stops—and water engineering continues
MicrogridModeler is an electricity and distributed-energy-resource techno-economic model. It is not a hydraulic network model, a desalination process simulator, or a substitute for electrical engineering. That boundary matters.
The platform uses a single-bus hourly energy balance. It does not establish feeder voltage, fault current, protection coordination, cable ampacity, transient stability, motor starting, harmonics, or interconnection compliance. On the water side, it does not calculate pump curves, pressure zones, tank water age, membrane flux, fouling, recovery, finished-water quality, concentrate management, or permit compliance.
Those constraints should be resolved by the appropriate water, process, civil, and electrical analyses. Their outputs can then inform credible hourly load profiles, operating cases, project costs, and reliability requirements inside the microgrid study.
Use the model for the decision it was built to support. It can compare DER sizes, dispatch, economics, and supported resilience scenarios for an electrical load. It cannot certify that the underlying water process or electrical network design will work.
A practical workflow for a pumping or desalination project
The strongest use of the platform is a disciplined handoff between water operations and energy planning. Start with service, not equipment: define the water volume, pressure, quality, storage, and outage performance the community or facility actually needs. Then translate feasible operating strategies into electrical load profiles.
Run more than one case. A constant desalination schedule, a solar-aligned production schedule, and a resilience-first schedule may produce different DER portfolios—but each load shape must first be acceptable to the process engineer and operator. Model the candidate PV, wind, battery, generator, and grid configurations; stress the leading cases; then carry the survivors into power-flow, protection, hydraulic, environmental, procurement, and constructability work.
The result is not a final design. It is something equally valuable early in a project: a visible, reproducible reason to advance one concept and retire another.
The bottom line
MicrogridModeler arrives with an appealing combination: it is quick enough for an initial conversation, detailed enough to expose hourly tradeoffs, and explicit enough about provenance and model limits to support serious review. For water utilities and remote-system planners, that can shorten the distance between “we need backup power” and a defensible shortlist of energy strategies.
The most impressive part is not a single optimized number. It is the ability to show how the number was produced, which constraints it passed, what data supported it, and where the next engineering discipline must take over.
Try the platform
Put a real water-system load through the model
Open the free browser modeler, choose a reference project or import an hourly load profile, and test the DER scenarios your operators and engineers want to review.