PREPARE, PREVENT, ANTICIPATE, ACT

According to UNHCR, the United Nations Refugee Agency, an average of 21,5 million people each year are forced to leave their homes because of the effects of devastating weather events such as floods, extreme temperatures or severe storms. In recent weeks, Cyclone Debbie in Australia, floods in Peru and flash floods in Colombia have left hundreds of deaths, victims and injured people. Heavy economic losses have compromised essential services for those countries, including the electricity supply in the affected areas.

The US Government has estimated that between 2002 and 2012 the US population experienced roughly 679 power outages, each affecting at least to 50.000 customers. For instance, super storm Sandy, in 2012 caused record floods in New York and New Jersey, damaging 650.000 homes and knocking out power for 8,5 million customers.  One year earlier, Hurricane Irene left 6,5 million people without power.

The RESCCUE project aims to increase the capacity of the cities to cope with the effects of natural catastrophes caused by climate change. Studying the different scenarios, anticipating which essential services will be affected and improving the coordination and the exchange of information between all the involved agents is essential so that cities can recover as soon as possible form a natural catastrophe.

Resilience is highly increasing around urban environments that are becoming bigger and more complex. Only in Europe, three of four people live in urban areas, and the services to meet the needs of this growing population demand are also growing. The IEA (international Energy Agency) World Energy Outlook 2016 states in its main scenario that electricity will account for almost 40% of additional consumption of energy to 2040.

The growing need for energy and the increasing role of renewables in the energetic mix represents a big challenge for the future and especially for the whole electric system. One of the responses to these challenges are microgrids, which are by definition independent small-scale electric systems that are able to autonomously generate and store energy, normally operating connected to a traditional centralised grid.

Their main benefits will come by the aggregation and decentralised control of the demand, storage and generation of energy in order to improve the security of supply.

They are a very useful tool to maintain the functionality of the electric grid during crisis events, and that is why Endesa, as part of the RESCCUE project, is studying how to use autonomous microgrids that can supply power in an event of an emergency or risk by focusing in the capacity to restore the power supply and also to restore other critical urban services.