What if your buildings could generate power for the grid? What if you could create power resiliency for your citizens? And what if, even in the middle of grid volatility, you could come as close as you can to bringing stability to your local grid system during the inconvenience of brownouts or blackouts?
Well, now that we have your attention, what if this was more than just a hypothetical?
The Sum is Greater Than Its Parts
Formally defined, resiliency is “the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties or toughness.” And what’s more difficult than the looming threat of a potential grid failure that will see thousands of your citizens without the necessity of electricity? As we’ve seen in the previous years, grid distress and compromise are inevitable as our power markets continue to change, becoming more volatile and undependable. This is something we must accept and, consequently, something we must take action to prepare for.
ResilienCity is a vision that encapsulates Aristotle’s famous maxim: The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. With cities working together as a unified front, we can create a resilient mode of distributed generation powered through a plethora of micro grids sustainably functioning within each city building. The self-sustaining integrity of this project enables cities to use their already existing infrastructure to support the grid in the event of overload – the parts coming together on behalf of the whole.
A Vision to Reduce Volatility
Combining the capacity of solar and backup generation, each participating city building can function as a self-sustaining powerhouse. Then, in the event of potentially compromising grid volatility, can take themselves off grid and sustain their power through the backup generation they’ve stored with solar. And if we can then assume that any one city has several participating buildings, the capacity to take all these powerhouses off-line in a self-sustaining manner can reduce peak load on the grid and help sustain power throughout their local communities.
A Goal to Sustain the Cities
Bringing Texas cties together in a large-scale distributed generation project of this magnitude has the potential to benefit all parties involved – the participating cities and their local residents. Cities can benefit from:
Long-term budget certainty: Reduce overall spend on electricity and mitigate risk by locking in power rates for up to a 25-year term.
Improved grid stability: Avoid rolling blackouts/brownouts and improve power quality throughout your local area.
Stabilized power certainty: Create more than one failure point to help ensure grid resiliency.
And residents can benefit from the security of knowing that their power is safer in the event of compromising weather patterns and resulting grid distress.
Creating micro-grids in strategic areas can ensure functionality of essential buildings and processes during energy outages, emergency situations, and calls for energy conservation – adding further benefit to the statewide grid.
A Probability for Progress
Distributing solar generation throughout hundreds of cities, covering hundreds of sectors, across thousands of rooftops (and otherwise unusable land resources) allows us to localize the power, support the grid and help sustain comfort and capacity for local Texas residents – consistently.
So, is it completely failsafe? Well, it’s the closest we’ve come so far.
Looking to be part of the solution? Volunteer for our Feasibility Study today!
