  Despite the recent rapid adoption of rooftop solar PV for residential
customers, islanded operation during grid outages remains elusive for most PV
owners. In this paper we consider approaches to improve the reliability of
electricity supply in the context of a residential microgrid, consisting of a
group of residential customers each with rooftop solar PV, that are connected
to the distribution network via a single point of common coupling. It is
assumed that there is insufficient PV generation at all times to meet the
electricity demand within the residential microgrid. Three optimization-based
algorithms are proposed to improve the reliability of electricity supply to
each residential customer, despite variability and intermittency of the solar
resource and periods of infrequent and sustained power outages in the
electricity grid. By means of a case study we show that the majority of
residential customers achieve greater reliability of uninterrupted electricity
supply when connecting to the residential microgrid in comparison to operating
in isolated self-consumption mode.
