Tuesday 25 November 2008

Peer-to-peer power

How do you make power infrastructure more resilient to damage? I guess the first step is underground power lines, though they have been found to be more likely to get struck by lightning, and are harder to repair when they get damaged.

I suppose fully distributed power generation coupled with underground lines would be pretty resilient to local outages. Say each generator is capable of producing 1.5 times the demand of an average home. Most of the time, it will run below capacity, and it has headroom to grow in future. Then say each generator is connected, peer-to-peer fashion, to two or three other houses. If one house requires repairs to their generator, their neighbours can pick up the slack while that repair is done offline. If a single inter-house line is cut, nobody will be without power, even while the line is dug up and repaired.

The trouble will come when many houses in a local area are destroyed. Each one will need extra power, although theoretically it could be routed from elsewhere as long as the underground lines are intact. Such infrastructure, however, would probably allow the use of temporary generators hooked up to specific locations to boost the local grid as required. In the end, though, it is probably cheaper and more efficient to generate power in bulk and run distribution lines over a distance than to wire everything together with single small generators.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - If everyone is generating enough power for themselves, one house offline is no big deal.
PPS - This idea is also known as "microgrids" in the electricity industry.

5 comments:

Linda said...

I am a strong supporter of underground power lines. Way out in the middle of nowhere South Dakota our lines were underground and we rarely lost power. There is a lot of summer lightening in SD and I never noticed that an issue. The neighbourhood looked nicer too.

John said...

I only have a memory of a TV show saying underground lines attract more lightning hits than overhead ones, but I also remember this was a surprise to them, so it probably doesn't affect the grid much. If they hadn't noticed, it's either not causing much disruption or it's not happening very often anyway.

Erin Marie said...

KAPOW!

That was my brain exploding.

John said...

Should I start putting "your brain may explode" warnings before this kind of post?

Kammorremae said...

Contrary to popular belief, some lightning is actually discharged from the ground into the sky. It makes sense to me that the presense of underground electrical cables could exacerbate this.