ABSTRACT
The Brevoort is a 1950s-era co-op tower that installed its own combined heat and power generation system in 2010, enabling the building to produce its own power. Essentially, the Brevoort had created its own grid to power itself: a "microgrid." The Brevoort co-op was resilient to the outages of Hurricane Sandy because of its structure as a microgrid. It could connect seamlessly to the rest of the grid, but isolate itself instantly in the case of any threat to the broader system. Though microgrids might seem like an innovative departure from the grid system, the concept of local electricity generation is not particularly new. In fact, America's earliest electric power systems in the 1880s were small, central stations serving only a few blocks of consumers. Formally known as "distributed energy resources," microgrids are decentralized alternatives to the traditional grid structure. They deploy energy generation close to the consumers they serve, rather than at a few large facilities many miles away.
