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When Hurricane Maria devastated the tropics in September 2017, he trained Puerto Rico's electrical system. Winds of 274 km / h (170 miles to the hour) ripped off poles, transmission lines and transformers, leaving a tangled mess on American territory in the Caribbean. For weeks, 1.5 million people have been deprived of electricity. Thousands of people have died as a result of the disaster, according to a study commissioned by the Puerto Rican government, and the island is still being rebuilt.
One of the most affected areas is the small island of Vieques. Located a few kilometers from the mainland of Puerto Rico, the island's electricity was lost after cutting a submarine cable. Although the Federal Emergency Management Agency has dispatched diesel generators to the island, Vieques has languished for months with an intermittent and sporadic electricity supply.
But a new grid began to come out of the ruins. Government agencies, rescue groups and private companies such as Tesla and Sunrun have installed solar panels and batteries alongside generators as well as transmission lines. For Vieques, the revitalized network has returned online without ever connecting to the continent. He may never reconnect again.
The government plans to make Vieques a case study and promote microgrids, said Omar Marrero, director of the Puerto Rico Public-Private Partnerships Authority, in an interview with Quartz last year. "Whatever the generation Quartzwe all agree on micro-networks. "
After decades of decay that has left the island's transmission system "fragile", with ongoing failures and billions of deferred maintenance, Puerto Rico will rebuild a new type of network based on a more resilient model and cleaner. The island passed in March a law to use 100% renewable energy by 2050 and to quickly connect new sources of clean energy and micro-grids to the main power grid.
The Vieques Autonomous Network will probably be the first of Puerto Rico's key micro-grids to connect homes, businesses and energy sources. The system will work primarily with a combination of solar panels and batteries and will rely on generators. If a storm like Hurricane Maria were to strike again, the disruption would be minimal. The new General Manager of Utilities Island, Walter Higgins, told Bloomberg Environment that the island could serve as a "model for the United States and the world of distributed, resilient and renewable microgrids and not dependent than renewable resources for most of the time. "
The adoption of micro-grids by Puerto Rico suggests a different energy future. Part of the billion people (pdf) in the world without electricity could finally benefit without the need for a central power grid. Although microgrids have provided a means for industrialized countries to increase resilience and network more renewable energy sources, they allow regions without electricity to overtake the electricity grid of the twentieth century.
What is a microgrid?
In its simplest form, a micro-network (pdf) is a small network of users and energy producers (power plants). In today's electrical system, the network radiates in a star pattern. In the center is a large power station (usually powered by fossil fuels). On the edges are homes and businesses that consume energy.
In a microgrid, this system is distributed. The power supply moves between several nodes of the network. Supply and demand are balanced locally in real time. Solar energy means that houses and buildings generate their own energy. The batteries maintain an excess supply close to the final destination, which reduces the need for heavy transmission lines.
A few hundred or thousands of customers can then operate independently of the centralized power grid or integrate it so that it can absorb energy from renewable sources such as wind and solar power. All this is coordinated by sophisticated software that automatically balances supply and demand on the network. "In the future, the grid looks less like a show [television] and more like the Internet, "says Haresh Kamath of the Electric Power Research Institute.
Yet realizing profits in the real world is more difficult than it seems. In relatively wealthy countries and big cities, billions of public investments have made electricity extremely cheap for customers. "[Electricity] is one of the least expensive products in the world, "says David Chiesa of S & C Electric, a supplier of power supply equipment. Some countries even deliver it at a price lower than the cost of production (without taking into account the high cost of pollution and global warming). Worldwide, prices (pdf) range from 0.06 cents / kWh in Saudi Arabia to 12 cents in the United States and 38 cents in Germany. An average American homeowner spends around $ 100 a month on electricity.
"The business case is still very difficult for micro-grids," says Chiesa. "It is still not inferior to the price of electricity network, with a few exceptions."
This made the microgrids difficult to sell. Yet some things are changing in their favor. First, infrastructure prices are falling for batteries and distributed solar generation. Second, maintenance and expansion costs for traditional power grids are escalating, even as damage from failures and accidents continues to grow (Pacific Gas & Electric, California, recently declared bankruptcy after transportation caused $ 30 billion in fires). Finally, distributed renewable energy sources and storage have begun to make traditional star-shaped architecture less attractive compared to alternatives.
Take Hawaii and Puerto Rico. Electricity prices on both islands are high and wind and solar resources abundant. Homes and businesses can generate cheap energy and plug them into micro-grids that bypass expensive (Hawaii) or unreliable infrastructure (Puerto Rico). In Puerto Rico, for example, Siemens claims to be able to build an improved mini-grid system (the mini-grids are essentially larger microgrids covering tens or even hundreds of thousands of customers) for only 7% more than the same. a traditional system, while offering a much higher efficiency. , reliability and reduced emissions. After including the price of breakdowns, like those that followed Hurricane Maria, the system is less expensive. Siemens is now offering a series of 10 "mini-grids" to serve the island. These resilient electrical "islands" can operate independently in the event of a power outage or be connected to the wider network where desirable.
Will developing countries go first?
We could witness the fastest deployment in poor countries. Their lack of investment in electrical infrastructure is changing the economic data. According to Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF), although much of the industrialized world has completed electrification in the 1950s, the network has not yet reached 14% of the world's population. At the electrified pace of today, 700 million people will still be without electricity by 2030. But yesterday's infrastructure is no longer needed to provide today's electricity.
In Sub-Saharan Africa, mobile subscriptions are more numerous (700 million) than access to reliable electricity (around 450 million). This is because wireless telecommunications have made it possible for countries to dispense with the costly architecture of the 19th century in favor of 21st century cellular towers and cheap handsets. Distributed power systems can do the same for electricity.
While the main network takes years, even decades, to reach very remote agglomerations, micro-grids fill the gap. The price of microarray electricity surpasses even the centralized network by taking into account the cost of customer connections (between $ 266 and $ 2,100 per connection, estimates Itamar Orlandi of BNEF). Decentralized systems running on solar photovoltaic (and sometimes battery) energy will be the least expensive option for 300 million people, or 75% of the new connections needed to provide electricity at all times. residents of sub-Saharan Africa, estimates the International Energy Agency. Most will be either mini-grids or off-grid individual systems powered by solar panels.
Ultimately, micro-grids could bridge the gap between centralized utilities and individual solar installations. Remote cities can build microgrids much faster than a public service will even reach them. Once this is done, micro-grids (and detached houses) can be integrated into the centralized system, while maintaining their independence during outages.
Scaling
Now, we just need to see them running on a large scale. Dozens of small examples exist all over the world, from Japan to Italy via Italy, combining solar panels, natural gas and diesel generators and battery storage. Smaller projects, such as schools and community centers, are online. US companies Sunrun and Sunova are currently working to install residential solar and battery systems that could one day connect to nearby micro-grids with smart software.
Utilities are also adopting "wireless alternatives" to traditional transmission and distribution infrastructures. Historically, grid operators built new lines long before the projected energy requirements (an expensive and sometimes unnecessary approach, as growth forecasts are often imprecise). A more efficient approach combines micro-grids with energy efficiency, demand response and batteries to extend the grid for peak load and avoid replacing components as they age. Public service commissions are working on new ways to fund and incentivize network operators to do so.
But experiences in countries like India show how difficult it can be when things do not line up. In a study entitled "How weak incentives can undermine smart technology," researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, have studied how one of the most promising solar micro-array installers of the Rural India, Gram Power, had stumbled despite everything, according to experts. After visiting 176 villages between 2010 and 2015, the company had installed only 10 microarrays. The cost of acquiring customers and maintaining the system was higher than expected. Theft and the reluctance of corporate agents to crack down on customers (usually their own neighbors) made it difficult to raise revenue.
Experiences like this have led India to rethink its rural electrification strategy (pdf) to put more emphasis on private solar home systems in order to avoid such problems. The lesson from Gram Power is that micro-grids are not a quick fix. Even when the benefits outweigh the costs, all electrification strategies, such as politics, are local. Circulating the electrons where they should be is not enough. Incentives matter as much as technology.
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