“This is pretty similar to what we want in our human engineered systems, right? We want to make sure the resilience modifications that we apply to the grid are going to be beneficial during storms and then also successful, and not a burden, during normal operations.”Įcologists call this sweet spot of redundancy versus efficiency the “window of vitality.” On a spectrum with perfect efficiency on one side and perfect redundancy on the other, this window is not smack in the middle. “These long surviving food webs cluster around patterns of system behavior that survive unexpected disturbances not only survive, but also continue to grow and develop when things are good,” said Layton. Striking a balance between building resilience into a system while minimizing the expenditure of unnecessary resources is exactly what nature does with aplomb. Our grids need to be tough in the face of calamity but also cost effective. In her paper, “An Ecological Robustness Oriented Optimal Power Flow for Power Systems’ Survivability,” which appeared in IEEE Transactions on Power Systems this spring, she and her collaborator, Katherine Davis, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Texas A&M, outline just what a power grid modeled on a food web would look like and why it would be more robust. So there’s something to learn here related to survival and resilience and how to do that effectively.” This is the design that has survived out of all those millions of years of R&D. And, despite that, when disturbances happen, the overall ecosystem also survives. “They're focused on themselves, making decisions for themselves. “If you think about an ecosystem, the species individually want to survive,” she said. Listen to our Podcast: Hydro and the Electric Grid If only our aging power grids, so fragile in the face of storms, earthquakes, and other incarnations of disaster, could be so smart.Īstrid Layton, a professor of mechanical engineering at Texas A&M University and director of the Bio-inspired Systems Lab, thinks our grids can be made just as resilient as nature’s food webs, by imitating them. This is what makes a food web resilient to environmental disturbances like droughts and floods. ![]() ![]() ![]() They can eat snakes and frogs and mice, among other little animals, and those prey, too, have many meal options. Hawks don’t starve when their favorite food disappears.
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