Study of small modular reactors in modern microgrids

Energy supply is one of the most important concerns of every government, energy authority, and researchers to meet the growing regional energy demands. Their target is to ensure less carbon dioxide emission, sustainable, efficient, and cost-effective energy solutions. Microgrids have the potential to solve some of the problems of conventional power grid and offer sustainable decentralized power system. Microgrid with modern distributed energy resources will play an important role to alleviate the dependency to the main grid, with the utilization of distributed energy resource such as wind turbine, solar photovoltaic, diesel generator, gas engine, micro turbine, and fuel cells. However, most of the current distributed generations within microgrids can't meet future energy demand expectations. small modular reactor (SMR) could be an effective and a viable power generation source for modern microgrids to support future electricity demands. A comprehensive study is conducted on microgrids with SMR through electricity generation profiles, geographical and environmental assessment, as well as cost analysis using simulation practices and data analysis. Copyright (C) 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.