Swarm electrification - Suggesting a paradigm change through building microgrids bottom-up

Abstract

This paper outlines a bottom-up concept for microgrids. A case study for Bangladesh illustrates the potential for building on the existing infrastructure of solar home systems and underlines the strength of the approach: it aims at economic and infrastructure development created from the communities themselves. Individual stand-alone energy systems are linked together to form a microgrid that can expand towards and eventually interconnect with national or regional grids. This approach can be likened to the concept of swarm intelligence, where each individual node brings independent input to create a conglomerate of value even greater than the sum of its parts.

A Decentralized Control Architecture Applied to DC Nanogrid Clusters for Rural Electrification in Developing Regions

“…Further, distribution efficiency is a major limitation for centralized architectures, as distribution losses become significant at low distribution voltages, thin conductor sizes and higher power levels [13]. Moreover, such architectures require relatively higher initial capital investment due to topdown sizing requirements [14].…”

“…Various distributed architectures for PV/battery-based islanded DC microgrids have been proposed in literature. Distributed architectures with bottom-up approach enable A Decentralized Control Architecture applied to DC Nanogrid Clusters for Rural Electrification in Developing Regions organic growth of microgrid, thereby, empowering local communities for sustainable development [14]. Wardah et al [15] presented a partially distributed architecture, in which peer to peer electricity sharing was enabled by GSM based through power management units (PMU's).…”

Quantifying the Benefits of a Solar Home System-Based DC Microgrid for Rural Electrification

“…The idea of bottom-up, decentralized rural DC microgrids that can grow organically with time has seen more proponents in literature [27,28]. However, existing studies like [28,29] mainly identify the financial benefits of interconnecting SHS. The advantage of demand diversity, that is the load profile peaks of different households occurring at different points in time, due to SHS interconnection, is captured in [15].…”

A System Complexity Approach to Swarm Electrification

“…This research seeks to further look into this hypothesis through the analysis of a newly developed bottom-up concept, referred to as swarm electrification (SE), a sharing-based energy infra-system, based on decentralization and resource efficiency. 17 SE is based on nodes in a swarm intelligence network where information and electricity flows are shared among neighbors "to achieve a compounding network effect, in that they are linked together to form a microgrid -to achieve a networked grid effect." 18 The concept follows the principle of a bottom-up initiative, often referred to grassroots innovations, in the sense of that it is a decentralized track which is generally carried out through non-governmental entities such as cooperatives, community user groups, or private entrepreneurs and households.…”

“…17 SE is based on nodes in a swarm intelligence network where information and electricity flows are shared among neighbors "to achieve a compounding network effect, in that they are linked together to form a microgrid -to achieve a networked grid effect." 18 The concept follows the principle of a bottom-up initiative, often referred to grassroots innovations, in the sense of that it is a decentralized track which is generally carried out through non-governmental entities such as cooperatives, community user groups, or private entrepreneurs and households. Smith et al describe grassroots innovations as "movements seek innovation processes that are socially inclusive towards local communities in terms of the knowledge, processes and outcomes involved."…”