Resilience (n): an ability to recover from or adjust easily to misfortune or change
Power cuts are here. They happen even in modern economies. They are real.
Europeans are facing the prospect of periodic power supply cuts to conserve energy this winter, thanks to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. No new thing. South Africans have experienced “Load Shedding” due to a lack of generating capacity for several years. Load Shedding is when the local supplier can no longer reliably meet customer demand and makes a somewhat arbitrary decision to simply cut power to a line serving a number of houses.
Within the United States, Texans experienced power outages during the extreme weather of winter in February of 2021 and Californians are living with power outages from cuts implemented to reduce the risk of wildfires. No one is immune. This article is about how to plan for these almost inevitable events no matter where you live, and it is the first in a series of articles on improving energy resilience in homes and small offices.
ModBESS can help with prioritizing and managing your household or business electric loads.
A comprehensive, planned and coordinated backup strategy across various loads in a building is always the best strategy. In the interim, some relatively low-cost steps can be taken to ensure important loads can be served continuously or as needed during power outages.
Today we discuss load analysis and ranking loads by importance and ease of backup.
The Quick and Easy First Steps on a Path to Full Energy Resilience
If you are under the gun with a short planning horizon, such as in Europe this year, it’s essential to take steps toward resilience in major aspects of power usage well before winter.
The technology exists to provide complete backup power. But seamless backup power for an entire house or office or other facility is very expensive, and it is not necessary. Furthermore, it lacks finesse. The cost of resilience can be reduced by allocating different levels of backup to different loads.
How can we prioritize usage value?
Let’s focus on a home. Are there certain appliances that are more important than others? The engineer in us says that it is likely that roughly 20% of the power used in your house represents 80% of the importance to you of that usage. Due to the ubiquity of power use, this is likely an oversimplification. Still, off the top of our heads we would prioritize heat in winter and refrigerator in summer for sure.
Internet access and lighting might well trump those for others. The importance of lights and the internet are often overlooked because they are so easy to backup. If home internet service is out, “Can you hotspot me?” is the common request made to ask for a share of ubiquitous cell phone internet service.
Lights can be replaced in the short term by LED lanterns and flashlights and by cell phone lights or even candles. The cellphone can be charged in a car in a pinch. Few people have experienced long-term communication isolation or lack of artificial light.
Maybe we should try to tabulate loads instead. Importance is graded 1-5 with 5 being most important or helpful or impactful on lifestyle and 1’s being least important or impactful. Essentially, 5’s are good/important and 1’s are bad/unimportant.
One may reasonably disagree on relative scores but likely it would not change the rankings much. Furthermore, it is even possible with today’s technology to have customers select their own priorities and preferences and an automated system will operate accordingly.
Mitigation
The low-hanging fruit are the 5’s in low energy demand. There are two: lights and internet – internet and communications will be discussed in our next article. Both 5’s are low power demand and are thus easy to fix.
Being ready to selectively disconnect high-use, low-priority loads should be part of everyone’s “survivability plan.” For true energy resilience, such loads should be cut automatically. Furthermore, with sufficiently smart technology, power outages no longer need to be an all-or-nothing proposition.
Strategies like immediately but temporarily lowering lighting levels, automatic safe controlled shutdown of computers and limiting the capability of cooking ranges and many other such options are all of a sudden on the table, particularly if the user has access to a battery storage system and a sophisticated, albeit inexpensive home energy management system.
In our future articles, we will deal with creating resilience for other important but larger loads that need more sophisticated solutions. The ultimate outcome, with the necessary help of professionals, will be an economically supplied, collaborative community that is entirely independent of any central utility supply.
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4
