The idea of local resilience and the fractal grid is indeed alluring. However, the costs and technical/safety challenges of building this are prohibitive with today's technology.
If a wire falls to the ground, there needs to be a way to isolate both sides of the fault before the supply can be restored. At the low-voltage grid level, this technology is not common and remains expensive. This sort of design would require devices that can sense a fault and isolate the area - deployed across the millions of miles/km of the LV network.
Once the fault is isolated, we need to have a system that can then balance supply and demand in real time and maintain the system frequency. DER is not able to do this today, but moves towards small-scale grid-forming inverters may make this more achievable. However, given the random nature of where a fault could occur, it would be difficult to have sufficient local generation (day and night) to always match demand - even if that demand was somewhat flexible.
Islandable communities could be economic where the community is relatively co-located and served by a long supply line.
For DER, the current economics (and physics) would suggest the islandable homes may represent a more cost-effective outcome that building a self-healing islandable grid.
The idea of local resilience and the fractal grid is indeed alluring. However, the costs and technical/safety challenges of building this are prohibitive with today's technology.
If a wire falls to the ground, there needs to be a way to isolate both sides of the fault before the supply can be restored. At the low-voltage grid level, this technology is not common and remains expensive. This sort of design would require devices that can sense a fault and isolate the area - deployed across the millions of miles/km of the LV network.
Once the fault is isolated, we need to have a system that can then balance supply and demand in real time and maintain the system frequency. DER is not able to do this today, but moves towards small-scale grid-forming inverters may make this more achievable. However, given the random nature of where a fault could occur, it would be difficult to have sufficient local generation (day and night) to always match demand - even if that demand was somewhat flexible.
Islandable communities could be economic where the community is relatively co-located and served by a long supply line.
For DER, the current economics (and physics) would suggest the islandable homes may represent a more cost-effective outcome that building a self-healing islandable grid.