The Grid: Anti-Fragility, Not Resilience, is What We Need
EPRI recently released research focused on Pole top components, vegetation management and more due to the focus that utilities have paid to resilience. Increased need for research and solutions due to the increasing number of superstorm related outages, including one that is battering Florida right now (10/8/2019) with one million customers losing power.
It's not hard to see that weather is becoming a bigger part of the issue and methods to reduce the impact will have to use technology and some of these do not need to be high-tech as some of the the findings from EPRI laboratory and field tests show including
When upgrading wooden poles, choosing replacements with a greater pole-top circumference may be more cost-effective than replacing them with steel or fiberglass poles.
Pole-top strength is more important than base strength. When upgrading poles that carry automated switches, reclosers, and other critical components, it may be cost-effective to also upgrade adjacent poles, which can help absorb forces from tree impacts.
Spacer cables can potentially reduce tree impact–related outages.
While the focus has been resilience the true requirement is to focus on Anti-Fragility
Our grid is more fragile than we realize. This became more apparent to me after reading Gretchen Bakke’s ‘The Grid’. But this is an optimistic post. As fragile as the grid is, we already have the technology required to make it antifragile. It starts with seeing the possibility that occurrences like the acquisition of Solarcity by Tesla, even if it does not fully make financial sense right now, provide to the possibility of bringing grid resilience. But what is Anti-Fragility?
All credit to the concept of antifragility goes to Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Seemingly abrasive and disdainful of people who falsely claim expertise, in his view, Nassim Taleb gave the world a new way to frame how systems that get stronger and benefit from chaos and volatility. He gave us a word for the opposite of ‘fragile’; Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better. Even with this simple understanding of antifragility it’s easy to see that the electric grid system I’ve described in the two examples above is fragile. A problem with the approaches being taken to fix our fragile grid is that we are focused on building a resilient grid, on building a grid that is capable of recovering quickly from difficulties or failure. This is the wrong approach. We need to build a grid that is antifragile, one that grows stronger with the stresses and the chaos. But how does Tesla/Solarcity get us there?
Antifragile grid: Amidst all the noise about autonomous vehicles what the pundits miss is the antifragile system capacity that comes as a result of many autonomous vehicles operating for a common purpose that are not centrally controlled. This concept is called swarming [PDF]. In laymen’s terms; every autonomous vehicle that is driving thousands of the miles on the road is gaining knowledge, through machine learning, that improves the collective knowledge of every autonomous vehicle out there. When one autonomous vehicle experiences a shock, say an accident, even though the vehicle might have a little damage, the collective whole (the autonomous driving knowledge database) learns and improves. One vehicle, a node in the system, might have failed, but the whole system (adaptive system) has grown stronger from the shock to that node.
Now replace ‘autonomous vehicle’ node in the transport system with a ‘Tesla roadster/Tesla Powerwall/Solarcity panel’ node on an antifragile grid. The same antifragility can be achieved, where a shock to one Tesla/Solarcity node does not cause the whole system to fail. In fact, the whole grid learns from the failure of that one node and grows stronger allocating resources dynamically.
Tesla Gigafactory (Image courtesy of https://www.tesla.com/gigafactory)
The Tesla battery pack and Powerwall, the real reasons why Elon is working on a gigafactory, combined with the solar panels from Solarcity start to move us towards this antifragile grid. The whole system will be managed by software (built by partners and competitors) that knows when you need power, where to pull it from (whether battery, solar panel or Powerwall) because of the price signal, seamlessly ensuring that you get your hot coffee to start your day or hot chocolate on a cold night.
To take the example further, what this looks like in the future;
One home with a Tesla/Solarcity system loses power.
the antifragile grid identifies the reason for the failure (from its database) or adds the failure to its knowledge base.
no other node on the grid fails, the system continues to function
the antifragile grid learns from the failure and implements a fix/self-heals.
the antifragile grid determines where there is excess capacity (a neighbor’s vehicle-to-grid enabled Tesla roadster) and powers up the failed node.
The antifragile grid has become a stronger and smarter system waiting for the next failure to learn from…
