Microgrid Controls and Dispatch

A microgrid controller decides which sources supply which loads moment to moment, and is what turns imperfect sources into reliable mission power.

The brain of the microgrid

The microgrid controller continuously matches generation to load: dispatching the fusion unit, charging or discharging storage, starting backup generation, and shedding non-critical load when necessary. It is the intelligence that makes a collection of sources behave as one dependable supply.

What the controller must do

• Prioritise mission-critical loads over convenience loads.
• Ride through a fusion-unit trip using storage until backup picks up.
• Manage the burner as a steady base-load source, not a fast-cycling one.
• Isolate faults so a local problem does not cascade.

Designing around the availability gate

Because the burner trips at a rate implied by 0.86–0.995 availability, the controller's ride-through and load-shedding logic is not a luxury — it is what keeps the mission up during expected outages. The controller is designed against the honest failure behaviour of the unit, with storage sized to the switching interval and clear priority tiers for load.

Controls and dispatch are mature engineering; the novelty is integrating a high-field fusion source with its particular start-up and trip characteristics. Good controls are a large part of why an installation can be resilient even though its fusion unit, alone, is not continuous.

The layer that hides the gate

The controller's ride-through and load-shedding logic is what keeps the mission up during the trips implied by 0.86–0.995 availability. Sized to the switching interval and structured around clear load-priority tiers, good controls convert an imperfect source into dependable mission power. The novelty is integrating a high-field source with its specific start-up and trip behaviour.