The ‘Plug and Power’ technology behind Power-Blox enables anyone, anywhere in the world, to create an autonomous, decentralized, Swarm Grid to power schools, hospitals or an entire village without any management, configuration or maintenance, so says the Swiss startup.
Power-Blox does this by “mimicking complex systems in nature” using a concept it developed called Swarm Power.
What the?
Swarm technology is based upon nature’s approach toward organizing complex structures in a fully decentralized way. In a swarm, the most complex systems are governed by a simple set of rules and that are acted upon without the need for centralized decision making. As the individual entities within the swarm follow this set of rules they interact with one another without knowledge of the swarm’s behavior, giving rise to an ‘intelligent’ global behavior for the entire system.
Power-Blox has taken this concept and applied it to a power grid. With Swarm Power, the power generation, storage and distribution are done with a fully decentralized architecture to manage fluctuating current, as opposed to a smart grid which needs a centralized architecture. The energy in the swarm is stored in nodes and every component of the grid learns how to adapt to the current state of the grid by observing the grid parameters and adapting its behavior with the use of artificial intelligence.
How does it scale?
The Power-Blox 200 series are individual, intelligent energy cubes with an integrated battery. Each cube provides 200 Watts of alternating current and can provide power for lighting, one refrigerator, a television and mobile phone / laptop charging. The cubes can be powered by an optionally provided solar unit or from any external source (such as solar, wind, hydrothermal, biomass, or a generator etc). Power-Blox acts as a universal energy interface and can be combined with any external energy source or storage device.
When a minimum of 2 Power-Blox are combined, proprietary algorithms enable the system to adapt and react with swarm intelligence, creating a Swarm Grid that can provide sustainable and regulated power for schools, hospitals, telecommunications infrastructure, agricultural equipment, remote tourist resorts, events / festivals, disaster relief, and up to entire villages and towns.
The scalability of Power-Blox is essentially limitless due to the modular architecture of the system. Anyone can scale energy storage and production by simply incorporating additional units into the system as energy requirements increase. Additionally, the cubes are completely ‘Plug and Power’ and don’t require any special configuration, engineering, or expertise when adding additional modules to the system.
Compared with ‘Smart Grid’ technology, a Power-Blox Swarm Grid offers the same ‘smart distribution,’ load balancing, and energy management, but requires no centralized architecture, software or configuration. It is simply ‘plug and power.’
Power-Blox’s technology has not only the potential to change how off-grids are built and operated, but could change the way conventional power grids work too. As the amount of available renewable energy increases, the design of today’s public grids are failing to tap the full potential of renewable energy. Their approach could address the challenges of public grids in a fundamental way: On one hand, it removes the need for a centralized architecture and control; On the other hand, it provides power storage capabilities inside the grid, as well as in the ‘last mile of the grid.’
Power-Blox has been awarded the Axpo Energy Award 2014, the UN National Energy Globe Award of Tanzania 2015, and is a top 10 Finalist for the InterSolar 2017 Award next month in Munich. The company is based in Brugg, Switzerland, and recently completed their second investment round.
— Solar Builder magazine
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