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Moshe C. Kinn, University of Salford, UK
Imagine there was a magic bullet that could guarantee a very high level of living standard, not only for the 1.4 billion people who are not yet connected to the electricity system, but to all of mankind for future generations. Now imagine that this technology is simple and has been around for over half a century. Can you guess what it is? Some clues are; it is renewable, sustainable, portable and available. If your answer is solar hydrogen energy systems, you are right. There may be debate about the degree of their portability, but both solar panels and hydrogen gas are portable. Both these forms of energy can be used to provide all the electricity needs for all mankind.[i]
Electricity is the lifeblood of all modern societies, yet its continual flow is taken for granted. It is only when there is a power cut that we start to appreciate and realise how dependent our daily living standards are on the continuity of its supply. Currently, about half the world population lives in urban areas, and it is estimated that by 2050, the global urban population is expected to approach 6.4 billion, (Gea, 2012). Therefore the robustness of the urban electricity system and the continuation of electricity supply, are critical to the future resilience of the urban environment, and to the continuation of the standard of living of the population.
In the developed world, all electricity generation systems are centralised with consumers accessing the system via a national grid. Any natural or manmade failure in the national grid system can have far reaching indirect consequences at a very long distance from the actual point of failure, i.e. a failure chain can ensue.
“A failure chain is a set of linked failures spanning critical assets in multiple infrastructure systems in the city. As an example – loss of an electricity substation may stop a water treatment plant from functioning; this may stop a hospital from functioning; and this in turn may mean that much of the city’s kidney dialysis capability (say) is lost. This failure chain would therefore span energy, water and healthcare systems.” (UNISDR, IBM, & AECOM, 2014).
As the urban population grows, an electrical failure will have increasing and more devastating secondary health (Nates, 2004), economic, security, and water impacts (DRAP, 2013) on the daily lives of more and more people.
Every year billions of US dollars are lost in economic activity due to power cuts (Balducci, 2002; Reichl, Schmidthaler, & Schneider, 2013; Sullivan, Vardell, & Johnson, 1997). This would be much reduced if the topology for the electricity system is of a distributed nature. This means that instead of the electricity being generated in huge power stations far from where it is being consumed, it is generated on the roof of the building that uses it. All electronic devices, like those that use batteries, need direct current (dc) electricity to operate. So the all dc system will not need the ave