After natural disasters: KIT Scientist Wants to Ensure Power Supply in Large Cities

After floods, hurricanes or other natural disasters, the affected cities are in a state of emergency. Decentralized grids, known as microgrids, are needed to restore the power supply as quickly as possible after such extreme weather events or a targeted hacker attack.

“The search for optimized microgrid layouts is highly complex and requires new algorithms to develop viable models from the available data,” says Sadeeb Simon Ottenburger, head of department at the Institute for Thermal Energy Technology and Safety (ITES) at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) and head of a German-American research group on microgrids.

Cyber attacks can also paralyze the power supply

“Natural disasters do not yet play as big a role in Germany as they do in other countries,” says Ottenburger. But it is only a matter of time before the actual and predicted increase in extreme weather events drives the discussion about decentralized power supply in this country too. In addition, cyber attacks are already a real threat to the security of supply in conurbations. “If you plan microgrids, you should do it right,” Ottenburger appeals. Proper planning is also the focus of the international research group. Or to put it another way: where should the boundaries of decentralized electricity grids be drawn in the future?

Fair distribution of electricity is a new approach

“Important military bases, industrial plants and power stations are already quite well protected against disasters or attacks,” says Ottenburger. In Karlsruhe, too, the security-relevant infrastructure can be brought back up quite quickly after a large-scale outage using decentralized grids or emergency power generators. However, Ottenburger and his team are not only looking at strategically important points in a major city when searching for future-oriented solutions. “We are also concerned with the fair or equitable distribution of supply,” says Ottenburger. This also means that richer districts must not be given preferential treatment when planning microgrids and poorer people must not be cut off from the power supply for longer than absolutely necessary.

Karlsruhe scientist works with data from the USA

The data basis for the research group was a comprehensive case study following power outages during Hurricane Florence in September 2018 in New Hanover County in the US state of North Carolina. The data enabled an analysis of the critical infrastructure, its vulnerability in conjunction with the geographical distribution of socially disadvantaged households and their access to basic services. The project team developed a universal design that enables a comprehensive assessment of urban resilience for each city and generates a microgrid design that takes technical and social issues into account.

“For urban planners, this is a sign of things to come,” says Ottenburger, citing one finding from the study. Equipping individual houses with storage batteries for emergencies is just as easy from a technical point of view as setting up decentralized energy grids with solar modules or combined heat and power plants. “It’s not about how you set up the microgrids,” says Ottenburger. “It’s about where.”

Cover photo: Dr. Sadeeb Ottenburger, Center for Disaster Management and Risk Reduction Technology, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, General Services – Crossmedia