The global push for universal energy access is one of the most significant challenges of our time. For many, the promise of reliable electricity remains out of reach. In remote villages, disaster-prone regions, and developing communities, the traditional centralized electrical grid is often not a viable solution. Its high costs, rigid infrastructure, and vulnerability to widespread failure make it ill-suited for these environments.
To provide energy to these communities in a sustainable and scalable way, we should look at different ways of creating the solution. Could we build the network from the bottom up? And what should it look like? (Top-down versus Bottom-up dialectic has interesting parallels in nanotechnology… actually, the best nano-builder we know is life… could we grow an energy access infrastructure? But I digress…)
Let’s imagine that we were directing the build-out of this bottom-up energy infrastructure. We should start by elucidating the basic principles that the system should be built on. These principles are resilience, autonomy, and a dynamic topology.
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