In the summer of 1977, a lightning storm took out New York City's electrical substations, plunging it into darkness. Looting, arson and riots broke out, causing more than $300 million (£234m) in damages across the city. A similar incident caused havoc in 2003 after a surge in the grid hundreds of kilometres away in Ohio. Soon, such devastating blackouts could be a thing of the past.
Around the world, cities are moving away from dependency on large, insecure electrical grids to localised energy production - a move that goes hand-in-hand with renewables. Buildings are being used to gather solar energy and capture wind power, and streets are harnessing the power of human footfall - and then storing it in microgrids. In 2018, this growing energy paradigm will make urban landscapes more resilient and greener.
This divvying up of energy production - called microgeneration - is being propelled in part by political and legislative forces. In the US, hundreds of cities have pledged to cut emissions to meet the goals of the Paris Climate Agreement that President Trump has snubbed - placing urban green energy at the frontline of the climate fight. In Europe, legislators will in 2018 introduce laws requiring new public buildings to be almost completely emission-free - enforcing a new era of local, renewable energy production.
"Regardless of legislation, buildings are seeing what the future is, and the future is generation on site," says Hamish Watson, CEO of Polysolar, a UK company developing solar panels that double as glass. The panels use a thin layer of translucent solar-active material that coats a conductive surface to turn sunlight into electricity. Many glass-fronted buildings globally now use Polysolar's technology, and most feed the energy into microgrids that power the building's computers or air conditioning. "It's a no-brainer in many respects. Why wouldn't you use a building's glass to generate energy?" Watson says. The company has plans to build its first transparent, solar-powered sound barriers along a US highway. "I think in 2018 we'll see a move from just a few specialist buildings to a much more standard adoption of [this solar technology]," Watson says.
Elsewhere, others are seeking different solutions. "As cities grow and become more dense we need to find ways of creating more self-sufficient structures," says Rahel Belatchew, founder of Swedish architecture firm Belatchew Arkitekter. Her answer is the Strawscraper, a conceptual building coated in thousands of straws that would generate an electric current as they're buffeted by the wind. In South Jakarta, Indonesia, another architecture firm, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill is building a skyscraper that channels wind through four turbines at its pinnacle. That will help the building achieve its net-zero energy goal; completion is expected by 2020.
Using energy that would otherwise go to waste, these methods can plug gaps in electricity provision. Ryan Harne, a mechanical engineer at Ohio State University, is leveraging that approach on an even finer scale: he wants to harvest the ambient energy generated by urban infrastructure - the natural sway of a skyscraper, or the juddering contractions of a bridge - using devices that convert those vibrations into electricity. "As we move to a more electrified urban environment we have to harvest everything available to us," he says.
By 2018, microgrid production is predicted to rise fivefold from 2012 levels, according to energy market consulting firm Pike Research. In cities, that could mark the beginning of the end for the current energy regime. Says Watson, "The big power companies are potentially a thing of the past.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
