The Resilient Node Cluster Analysis Tool (ReNCAT), developed by Sandia National Laboratories, is now publicly available for download. This desktop application provides decision support for stakeholders to identify potential portfolios of microgrids within a community or set of communities that maximize residents’ access to critical services in an equitable way while minimizing investment costs needed to build the microgrids and implement other resilience measures.
Using ReNCAT, analysts and stakeholders can:
- Identify portfolios of microgrids that tradeoff between lowering social burden and investment costs
- Quantify overall social burden, social burden for geographical subsets of the population, and social burden associated with individual types of critical services
- Analyze tradeoffs between dropping critical and/or non-critical loads and purchasing more generation
- Understand how critical service coverage changes with additional investments as social burden decreases and cost increases
Sandia works with cities, community organizations, utilities, contractors, and universities on ReNCAT and social burden projects. ReNCAT and its social burden evaluation have been used for multiple projects and agencies, some of which include analyses for the communities of New Orleans, LA; Puerto Rico; Pittsburgh, PA; Nags Head, NC; San Antonio, TX; the Iowa Tribe of Kansas and Nebraska; Colorado Springs, CO; and the state of California.
View the Renewable Energy & Distributed Systems Integration webpage for more information about Sandia’s capabilities and research.
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June 7, 2023