Jamaica Partnership
The USAID-NREL Partnership is working with the Government of Jamaica to modernize its energy sector and increase energy resilience against natural disasters.
The Government of Jamaica is working with the USAID-NREL Partnership to conceptualize a network of critical, energy-resilient facilities—such as fire stations, hospitals, emergency shelters, and food distribution sites—and identify the technical requirements necessary for their design and procurement to ensure these services, in support of vulnerable populations, do not go without power after disasters.
Together with in-country partners, the USAID-NREL Partnership is helping to:
- Establish risk and resilience criteria based on hazard exposure, demographic information, and existing infrastructure
- Conduct a spatial assessment to identify, prioritize, and map critical facilities across Jamaica
- Assess options and corresponding technical requirements for energy and water resilience at priority sites
- Provide best practices for the procurement of services and capabilities.
Electricity generation and storage at these critical facilities using renewable energy sources and battery storage is a priority for Jamaica. Using REopt, NREL is helping optimize system sizes and operating strategies to provide economic savings while grid-connected and extend site survivability during large grid outages.
Activities
To support Jamaica's goals of increasing energy resilience during disruptive events, the USAID-NREL Partnership, with management support from Jamaica's Ministry of Local Government and Community Development, conducted a risk and resilience assessment to identify and prioritize critical facilities. The project's steering committee, assembled of Jamaican government officials across key sectors, provided insight towards local perspectives and subject matter expertise to guide the assessment and findings.
By using geospatial data to determine exposure to hazards—including factors such as population density, sea level rise projections, flood maps, elevation, and exposure to natural disaster risk—the assessment identified which regions within Jamaica are most vulnerable to weather and climate-related hazards. This analysis helped indicate high-priority regions for critical facilities.
A list of 1,700 critical facilities was then intersected with the data and ranked or filtered according to established criteria. Results were summarized in an interactive map that allowed stakeholders to visualize and filter facilities across the island by type and resilience criteria. Facilities were grouped into "resilience hubs" using a spatial density algorithm to identify clusters of facilities that could be powered together in a microgrid. These clusters serve as areas where community members could access a range of services in one trip, thereby making services more accessible to their communities.
An important consideration in the design of this network was the use of existing facilities such as churches, community centers, or other institutional buildings that are already in regular use and often have deep social networks that can be leveraged for safety and distribution of supplies and services during a crisis.
The final facility selections were then analyzed to model the potential for renewable energy systems and understand which of these facilities were most appropriate to invest in for energy resilience upgrades or whether any new facilities may need to be constructed. With this analysis, decision makers can better direct resources toward regions, communities, or clusters of facilities that benefit most from energy resilience investments.
The NREL team also conducted site visits for two of the facilities selected and analyzed them using REopt to understand the optimal mix of renewable energy, conventional generation, and energy storage technologies needed to meet cost savings, resilience, emissions reductions, and energy performance goals at a particular site. The results were based on preliminary data and were recommended to be validated prior to pursuing procurement.
In addition to facility network analysis, the USAID-NREL Partnership hosted hands-on training for modeling renewable energy systems at Jamaican facilities using REopt®. The workshop was provided to Jamaican stakeholders involved with supporting Jamaica's energy resilience goals and those looking to learn about estimating financial and resilience costs and benefits of on-site renewable energy projects such as energy professionals, resilience planners, or facility managers.
The workshop components included an overview of a REopt model for distributed energy resources and a series of hands-on case studies, including an overview of how to model resilience at certain facility types using the new REopt component of the Energy Resilience Performance tool. The Energy Resilience Performance tool allows users to explore probability of outage survival for outages occurring at any hour of the year and accounting for component reliability.
To ensure appropriate technical solutions are developed and solicited, the USAID-NREL Partnership also reviewed Jamaica's procurement and request for proposal guidelines, organization, and process for energy resilience investments including microgrid and battery energy storage system considerations. As part of the review, the team provided guidance and best practices to assist Jamaica's procurement of energy resilient systems, including:
- Storm-hardening requirements for hurricane survivability including NREL's
- Interconnection requirements and process
- Net-metering allowability and long-term operation and maintenance needs
- Evaluation criteria that improve the facility bids and review process.
Due in part to the USAID-NREL Partnership's activities, Jamaica is now looking to increase its government, parish, and critical facility knowledge and capacity to replicate these project outcomes for investing in additional energy resilience projects in the future.
Toolkits Used
Contact
Share
