Sir Richard Branson’s Necker Island Microgrid – Ph.1

Virgin’s Necker Island is a luxury island in the British Virgin Islands, home to Sir Richard Branson and his private residence. As part of the Carbon War Room , a non-profit organization to fight climate change, the Necker Island microgrid was meant as proof of concept to showcase the capabilities of distributed energy technologies to help reduce the Caribbean’s dependence on fossil fuels. 

In the midst of Necker’s tropical paradise, our team of engineers designed, implemented, and commissioned an integrated and network and controls system to connect the island’s Distributed Energy Resources (DERs), namely 900kW of diesel generators, 350kW Solar, and desalination plant. Little did we know that our focus on building a secure and resilient system would soon face a tough challenge.

In 2017, Hurricane Irma was a true test and proving ground for the resiliency and security of the system that we built. While external communications were understandably knocked out by the knocked out during the category 4 winds, our design allowed the microgrid to continue to operate on the island, record data, and function as expected as soon as it was safe for the gens, desalination and solar field to come back online once the worst part of the storm had passed.