8:00 – 9:00 am

Registration and Continental Breakfast

9:00 – 9:30 am

Opening Keynote Address

9:30 – 10:30 am

Utility, Community & Resiliency Microgrid Deployments

Utilities and municipalities are increasingly deploying community and utility-owned microgrids to improve resilience, manage distributed energy growth, and support critical services. This session explores deployment models, ownership structures, and operational lessons.

• Strategies for community resilience planning
• Evolving utility microgrid models
• Case studies of leading municipal deployments
• Addressing interconnection complexity remains significant
• Advances in multi-customer systems

Agenda

Note: Subject to change

Tuesday, December 1, 2026

8:00 – 9:00 am Registration and Continental Breakfast

9:00 – 9:30 am
Opening Keynote: Microgrids & Energy Storage as Critical Infrastructure
Microgrids and energy storage are rapidly evolving from niche resiliency projects into strategic infrastructure supporting grid reliability, electrification, energy security, and economic continuity. This keynote examines their growing role in the future distributed energy landscape.

• Resiliency driving infrastructure investments
• Storage enabling operational flexibility
• Distributed generation becoming strategic
• Electrification increasing system demands
• Utilities redefining grid architecture

9:30 – 10:30 am
Session 1: Utility, Community & Resiliency Microgrid Deployments
Utilities and municipalities are increasingly deploying community and utility-owned microgrids to improve resilience, manage distributed energy growth, and support critical services. This session explores deployment models, ownership structures, and operational lessons.

• Strategies for community resilience planning
• Evolving utility microgrid models
• Case studies of leading municipal deployments
• Addressing interconnection complexity remains significant
• Advances in multi-customer systems

10:30 – 11:00 am Morning Coffee Break

11:00 – 12:15 pm
Session 2: Energy Storage Integration, EMS Platforms & Intelligent Controls
This session discusses advances in energy management systems and storage optimization platforms for successful microgrid operations. Panelists will explore EMS architecture developments, DER orchestration, battery optimization, and autonomous control strategies. The discussion will be driven by case study analysis and results from the field.

• Advancements in EMS platforms
• Improving storage economics through optimization
• The role of DER coordination in enhancing reliability
• Adoption of autonomous controls
• Status of interoperability standards

12:15 – 1:15 pm Lunch

1:15 – 2:30 pm
Session 3: Long-Duration Energy Storage & Hybrid Microgrid Architectures
This session examines advances in long-duration storage technologies and how they are becoming increasingly important for resilient and flexible microgrid operations. Panelists will discuss hybrid architectures combining batteries, thermal storage, hydrogen, and distributed generation resources.

• Recent developments and momentum in long-duration technologies
• Hybrid systems flexibility
• Storage resilience capabilities
• Opportunities in thermal storage
• Achieving reliability via fuel diversity

2:30 – 3:00 pm Afternoon Coffee Break

3:00 – 4:00 pm
Campus, Healthcare & Mission-Critical Microgrids
Universities, healthcare systems, military bases, and transportation hubs continue to lead advanced microgrid deployments. This session looks at specific case studies of hybrid sustainable energy microgrids to explore operational priorities, reliability strategies, and lessons learned from mission-critical facilities.

• Healthcare resiliency requirements
• Advances in campus systems sophistication
• Islanding capabilities – integrating with the utility
• Business models and economic considerations
• Reliability metrics driving investments

4:00 – 5:00 pm
Industrial Microgrids, Battery Storage & Energy Security
Industrial and commercial operators are investing in microgrids and onsite storage systems to manage rising electricity costs, improve reliability, and support decarbonization objectives. Speakers in this session will examine practical deployment models and operational strategies, addressing topics such as:

• Time-to-power and achieving energy security for C&I customers
• Enabling technologies, challenges and opportunities
• Battery deployments as key components of C&I systems
• The state of flexible onsite generation
• Enhancing resiliency and improving operational continuity

5:00 – 6:30 pm Reception

Wednesday, December 2, 2026

8:30 – 9:30 am Continental Breakfast

9:30 – 10:30 am
Renewable Integration, Solar-Plus-Storage & Hybrid Microgrids
Solar, wind, fuel cells, and storage are increasingly combined into hybrid microgrid systems capable of supporting resilient and low-carbon operations. This session reviews architecture strategies and the operational optimization of such systems, including such topics as:

• Advances in hybrid systems reliability
• Renewables penetration – trends and projections
• Dispatch optimization and curtailment reduction
• Recent developments in storage supporting renewable integration

10:30 – 11:00 am Morning Coffee Break

11:00 – 12:15 pm
Utility Coordination, Interconnection & Grid-Interactive Storage
Microgrids and storage systems are evolving into grid-interactive assets capable of supporting broader utility operations. This session explores interconnection challenges, grid services participation, and utility coordination frameworks.

• Evolving grid services markets
• Interconnection reform
• Maximizing operational flexibility for utilities
• Demand response and aggregation models – recent case studies

12:15 – 1:15 pm Lunch

1:15 – 2:15 pm
Resilient Microgrids for Extreme Weather & Grid Outages
Climate-driven grid disruptions are increasing demand for resilient distributed energy systems. This session examines how microgrids and storage systems are being designed to withstand outages, severe weather, and infrastructure failures.

• The role of distributed energy systems in outage mitigation
• Hardening strategies and enabling technologies
• Lessons learned from recent case studies
• Leveraging storage and microgrids in recovery planning

2:15 – 2:45 pm Afternoon Coffee Break

2:45 – 4:00 pm
AI Infrastructure, Data Centers & Flexible Energy Storage Systems
Rapid data center expansion and AI-driven electricity demand are creating new opportunities for resilient distributed energy and storage infrastructure. This session explores the evolving role of microgrids in supporting high-density computing environments.

• Microgrids and energy storage applications for data centers
• Data centers as grid assets
• Flexible power architectures
• Innovations in addressing power center cooling requirements
• Storage supporting load management

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