In 2008, the US government bailed out the banking industry on the grounds that it was "too big to fail." In other words, we're so dependent on the financial sector that allowing it to collapse would be catastrophic for society as a whole. While the bailout offered temporary relief, the industry and its regulations remain largely intact, which makes me wonder when the next financial crisis will be. But I'm an engineer, not an economist, so let's talk about a technology on which we all depend ...

Grid Transmission Lines (Image: US Department of Energy)

The Power Grid: Too Big to Fail

The National Academy of Engineering considers electrification to be the greatest technological achievement of the 20th Century - so much so that six of the next nine achievements in their top ten depend on electricity. It's safe to say, then, that the grid is too big to fail. Yet, it was designed over a century ago and based on the technology of its day: centralized energy production that's distributed to consumers. Some of the technology has been modernized, but the basic topology is the same. The system is highly vulnerable to attacks and failures, and it stifles innovation in distributed generation and renewable energy. Of course, something that's too big to fail is also too big to redesign from scratch.

Or is it?

I'd like to think that engineers make better decisions than policy-makers. Case in point: the Swiss company Power-Blox is looking to redesign the grid as a collection of interconnected mini-grids. For guidance on the overall design, the company asked, "What Would Nature Do?" The answer nature provided: swarms. The company's proving ground: developing nations that don't have an established grid. If it plays well there, we may someday see our own power grid rebuilt from the ground up.

Swarm Technology

In nature, ants, bees, fish, and many birds exhibit a swarm mentality. Each member operates on a simple set of rules: 1) move in the same direction as your neighbor; 2) stay close to your neighbor; and 3), don't collide with your neighbor. The creatures themselves are quite simple, the swarm can scale up when conditions are favorable, and the collective is not dependent on a single member or a central controller. (Ants and bees have a queen, but that's about reproduction - she's not giving orders to the workers.) Power-Blox thinks that the swarm approach can be used to build a more robust power grid.

The Swarm Grid





According to Power-Blox, "In a Swarm Grid, every component learns how to adapt to the current state of the grid by observing the grid parameters and adapting its behavior with the use of artificial intelligence." I asked Power-Blox founder Alessandro Medici to elaborate on that. I'll let him explain it:

"We are very early at the beginning of the Artificial Intelligence integration and just opened a huge research field. At the moment it is more a pattern matching observation and not yet a fully-fledged AI. So, the learning aspect is done manually, by observing the behaviors of the Power-Blox in the swarm and adapting the firmware."





Power-Blox Founder and CEO, Alessandro Medici

"Our next step will be, to integrate an IoT communication and get real-time data from the field. With this information, we can feed the AI algorithm to learn how to adapt to the various high speed and low-speed supply and demand challenges within a mini-grid. For example, if we identify a bounce in a swarm-grid with a large number of Power-Blox, the single Bloxes could react when they observe the first bounces by slightly changing their behavior. Once the Power-Blox learned how to identify such a problem and what the solution is to counteract, each Blox can react individually and stabilize the grid."