Christophe Albertus, Head of the Engineering Design Department at Socomec, argues that battery energy storage and decentralised resilience are becoming vital tools in protecting against growing electricity blackouts and grid disruptions in Europe. Recent blackouts across the UK, the Canary Islands, Spain, and Portugal have thrust the issue of grid resilience back into the spotlight, highlighting the challenges posed by the switch to variable renewable energy sources.
Albertus explains that the rapid integration of renewable energy sources into the grid is reducing our ability to control grid frequency and stability. “Renewable grids lack the inbuilt resilience of ‘system inertia’,” he says, referring to the combined kinetic energy stored in synchronously spinning power station turbines that keeps them resistant to sudden frequency shifts. Without this inertia, weather-related variations in renewable generation can produce ‘frequency drift’, potentially affecting power quality and electrical equipment.
The increasing interconnectedness of Europe’s grids means that any disruption to power supply can produce wider domino effects across the continent. At the same time, the rapid electrification of the economy means that any grid instability can ripple across multiple sectors. Recent outages in Spain, for example, caused widespread disruption across industrial and commercial facilities, wiping an estimated €1.6bn off annual GDP.
Albertus believes that decentralising power management, energy storage, and generation could make our economy more resilient to power supply risks. “Just as distributed computing helped protect the digital economy from data centre outages, the decentralisation of power could similarly make our economy more resilient,” he suggests.
He points to pioneering organisations that are turning to smart battery energy storage systems (BESS) and onsite power sources to provide off-grid power during an outage. Intelligent power management systems can now perform ‘planned islanding’, disconnecting from affected electricity networks and restoring full power from onsite sources within 30 seconds of a blackout. These systems can even form microgrids able to operate fully independently from the main grid.
Advanced energy management systems can automatically calculate and regulate energy consumption, production, and storage across buildings to balance off-grid supply and demand during an outage. They can ‘derate’ or reduce the output of onsite generators to avoid overcharging batteries or practice ‘load shedding’, reducing power consumption to conserve electricity.
Albertus envisions a future where ‘edge electricity’—based around onsite energy management, storage, and production—could transform economic resilience. Building owners could use advanced modelling to size and scale battery energy storage systems to their future energy needs, providing a secure and future-proof power supply. He also foresees ‘resilience-as-a-service’ models offering more flexible, affordable energy security for smaller commercial and industrial facilities.
Beyond resilience, there are commercial benefits to intelligently managing, storing, and producing power onsite. Companies could harness smart islanding systems to take advantage of price schemes that reward major consumers for reducing peak-time power consumption. Storing surplus power onsite also enables ‘peak shaving’, strategically charging and discharging batteries to reduce peak-time consumption and thus electricity costs. Surplus power can even be sold back to the grid to provide essential functions from flexibility to frequency regulation.
Albertus argues that recent events in Europe have highlighted the need to future-proof electric grids against a more unstable renewable energy landscape. “Ultimately, the transition to decentralised renewable energy sources will require a parallel shift towards decentralised resilience so that electric grids cease to be a single point of failure for the economy,” he concludes.
This shift towards decentralised resilience could significantly shape the development of the energy sector. It could accelerate the energy transition by plugging gaps in electric grid infrastructure while the main grid is being expanded. It could also create new business models and revenue streams, transforming resilience into revenue. Moreover, it could enhance the stability and flexibility of the entire network, benefiting both large consumers and the grid as a whole. As Albertus suggests, the future of grid resilience may lie not in centralised control, but in decentralised, intelligent, and flexible systems.